Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Cleopatra Mathis's "Living Next Door to the Center for Cold Weather" is a poignant exploration of memory, loss, and the human relationship with time and nature. Through vivid imagery and layered reflections, Mathis constructs a narrative that weaves together the external environment of the Cold Regions Research Lab and the internal landscapes of familial memory, loss, and reconciliation. The poem’s complexity emerges from its interplay of the physical and emotional, the immediate and the distant.

The poem opens with a description of the speaker’s proximity to the research center, a sterile and guarded institution dedicated to studying cold. The imagery of chain-link fences, a blank green knoll, and the impenetrable scrubland evokes a sense of separation, both physical and metaphorical. This setting mirrors the speaker’s emotional state—on the edge of a harsh winter, a newcomer to both the climate and her current stage of life. The contrast between the cold, impersonal machinery of the lab and the warm, intimate memories of her family sets the tone for the poem’s exploration of connection and disconnection.

Mathis draws on the natural landscape to frame the speaker’s memories, with the hill and its overgrown terrain becoming a metaphor for the inaccessible past. The speaker’s recollections of her great-aunt’s cedar tree and her grandfather’s olive trees are imbued with sensory detail, anchoring her family’s gestures and voices in tangible imagery. These memories, however, are tinged with loss, as the family members exist now only in the speaker’s mind. The coughing of her grandfather and the physical flaws that marked her relatives—birthmarks, moles, and scars—are rendered with tenderness, suggesting that these imperfections are as much a part of their identity as their actions and words.

The poem shifts between the speaker’s present reality and her remembered past, creating a sense of temporal dislocation. The invasive noise from the research center—a “hacking in some faltering machine”—echoes the coughs of her grandfather, merging the physical environment with her internal world. This layering of sound and memory highlights the persistence of the past, which continues to intrude on and shape the present.

Mathis explores the speaker’s ambivalence toward her current life. While she considers climbing the hill to confront the past, she remains hesitant, acknowledging both the futility and necessity of such an act. The hill becomes a symbolic barrier, representing the effort required to reconcile with her history. The imagined river beyond the hill, described as warm and inviting, contrasts with the cold rigidity of the lab and the “manufactured wall” of the plow, suggesting a longing for natural simplicity and emotional release.

The poem’s climax comes in its reflection on ritual and finality. The speaker recalls a moment of profound loss—the death of her grandfather—and the cultural and familial traditions surrounding it. Her refusal to kiss the icon for her dying grandfather reflects a child’s instinctive resistance to death’s rituals, but it also underscores the enduring impact of that moment on her understanding of mortality. The grandfather’s dying gestures and murmured Greek create a sense of sacred continuity, tying the personal to the universal and the ephemeral to the eternal.

Mathis concludes with a meditation on what matters in the face of loss. The speaker expresses a yearning to embrace life “for its necessities,” finding solace in the day-to-day rather than being consumed by what is lost. The recurring image of her thirty-year-old mother in the “chilled room of sleep” embodies this reconciliation, as the speaker learns to coexist with the past rather than allowing it to dominate her present.

The poem’s rich, multi-layered structure mirrors the speaker’s emotional journey, with its seamless transitions between memory and observation, natural and human landscapes. Mathis’s precise imagery and lyrical language evoke a deep sense of place and time, while her exploration of familial bonds and the inevitability of loss resonates universally. "Living Next Door to the Center for Cold Weather" is ultimately a meditation on resilience—the ability to carry the weight of memory while forging a path forward. The poem’s enduring power lies in its capacity to hold these dualities in balance, offering both sorrow and solace in equal measure.

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