Christmas Blizzard

Christmas Blizzard

Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence

of love, which confers meaning to loss.  Loss is not

felt in the absence of love.  “The queen died and then

the king died” is a plot, wrote E. M. Forster in The Art

of the Novel, but “the queen died and then the king died

of grief” is a story.

                               The Light of the World

                               Elizabeth Alexander

I suppose it was over long before I knew

and maybe that was because I loved you and hoped.

You know, it was the kind and sort of love that grew

in the same plot of earth and at about the same

time, it felt the same sun and rain and snow though

maybe not the same amounts and maybe not

at the same time.  You had been rooted

a few months before me and bore

the empty crib by yourself longer and more loudly.

Our mother used to say you cried for the first

eighteen months of your life so that means

I heard you for only a small few of those months and by

then with the three of us, two and a half years old

and younger, she’d had it to her elbows—

bones

she’d lean on out on the doorstep she said, away

from us long enough to not murder us.  She said

this euphemistically, though over time I didn’t entirely

doubt her and it wasn’t body she’d’ve killed anyway

but she certainly in her own crave and poverty

stole from each of us bits of soul that would, like a buried

bobble dug up with a spoon and absently discarded,

prey it to her lips and keep it between her teeth.  We

didn’t know what we’d dug up or what we’d lost.

Maybe it was this: in the chaos and the lull between the next

chaos it was the sound of someone’s loving

breath against our cheek.  It makes me think of Alexander

Graham Bell “speaking” to his deaf mother, how he’d

rest his lips against her cheek and she, fingertips like

a thrush’s wings, would feel his words and touch her

response to him—I bet this was the kind

of contact we ached for and ultimately wouldn’t sooth

you, full to the hood with colic and trauma of her

abandonment.  I think we say out of our own ache:

we say: this is what I want, we say: this is what my day needs

to look like to make me happy only I can’t reach—or

don’t want to, like the day after the blizzard, the top

of the snow goes colder, goes frozen and we stay

behind the dark window looking at the warm houses

in the valley and watch the smoke go up into the clean

sky and say I could have that but I can’t

find my coat or hat or a convenient pair of skis or skates

because see the way is paved in ice.  Come spring

and given the life of seeds some of what and who

we are could make it that little bit of the way if it weren’t

for the settlement of birds, the variety of spiders,

the cinema of buds all different manner of distractions.

Rooted as we are in it we can’t know if we wintered

well at all, if we kept close enough to our heartwood

to prevent freezing altogether.  I think maybe

and ultimately the great distance will never be even

or broached between us and it’s not I’ve given up

trying more it’s like the day our mother died and you’d

left hours before and I stayed and after she was

finished one of the first things I realized was she wasn’t

alive to hurt anyone ever again and maybe you should’ve

stayed to come to know that too and known

where you draw the line, when to begin to say:

I’m on my way to being through with being hurt

by you and that starts it always starts with putting it

all down and opening the window or looking up

into the sky after the Christmas blizzard is through

and seeing not just blue, no not just blue but winter

birds coming home to roost in our bare, ice crusted

birch.