to Jane Kenyon

The big wooden clock you gave me
our first Christmas together
stopped in September.
The Bristol Watch Maker
kept it six weeks. Now it speeds
sixty-five minutes to the hour, as if
it wants to be done with the day.

When I try talking with strangers
i want to run out of the room
into the woods with turkeys and foxes.
I want to talk only
about words we spoke back and forth
when we knew you would die.
I want never to joke or argue
or chatter again. I want never
to think or feel.

                      Maggie Fisher
mailed pictures of the baby.
On Thanksgiving I brought Dick
from Tilton to Andrew’s for dinner.
Peter grinned; we hugged Arianna
and conversed with Emily.
For three hours we played,
teased, laughed together.
Suddenly I had to drive home.

The first snow fell seven months
from the day you died.
We used to gaze at the early snow
where it heaped like sugar
or salt on boulders, barn rofs,
fence posts, and gravestones.
No one ploughs Cemetery Road;
I will miss visiting you
when snow is deep.
                           In Advent
for twenty years you opened
the calendar’s daily window;
you fixed candles in a wreath
for church; you read the Gospels
over again each year:
The Child would be born again.

Most years we woke up by five
to empty our stockings.
You gave me Post Its, paperclips,
shortbread, #1 pencils,
and blank books. I gave you
felt pens, paperclips, chocolate,
and something libidinous
in the toe.

              I remember
only one miserable Christmas.
You were so depressed
that the spidery lace of a shawl
and a terracotta Etruscan woman
only left you feeling
worthless, stupid, and ugly.
Melancholy still thickens
its filaments over the presents
I gave you that morning.

Even last December
when our petrochemical three-foot
balsam stood on a glass
tabletop in that gimcrack Seattle
apartment, you strung it
with tiny lights, interrupting
yourself to vomit. Bald
as Brancusi’s egg, with limbs
as thin as a Giacometti strider,
you sat diminished
in a soft chair, among pumps
and bags. I programmed
the Provider for twelve hours
of Hyperalimentation. Wearing
plastic gloves, I set up
the Bard-Harvard infusion
device to deliver Vancomycin.

Before your November transplant,
you had ordered me
loafers from L.L. Bean.
From another catalog you bought
flowery green-and-white sheets.
I gave you a black MoMa
briefcase and cashmere sweats
from Neiman Marcus.
You preened, rubbing the softness
against your face.

                         Your feast
last year was applesauce
for pills, Ensure Plus,
and an inch square of bread
and jelly. I read you
from Luke’s gospel, then John’s;
and then we fell silent
as the Child was born—
adored, clung to, irreparable.

*

This first Advent alone
I feed the small birds of snow
black oil sunflowere seed
as you used to do. Every day
I stand trembling with joy
to watch them: Fat mourning doves
compete with red squirrels
for spill from rampaging nuthatches
with rusty breasts
and black-and-white facemasks.
I cherish the gathered nation
of chickadees, flashy
with immaculate white vests,
with tidy dark bibs and feet,
spinning and whirling down
from the old maple, feather
ounces of hunger, muscle, and bliss.

This year late autumn darkness
punishes me as it used
to punish you. For decades,
when December night cloesd in
mid-afternoon and you suffered,
I hunched by the reddening
Glenwood, finding the darkness
a comfort. Feeding your birds
consoles me now. If you
were writing this letter,
what would you turn to now?
Maybe you’d look at the mouse
that Ada offers.

                     This year,
there’s no tree for Gus to sniff
and Ada to leap at, dislodging
an ornament from your childhood.
I toss the dead mouse outside
on Christmas afternoon
and wash my hands at the sink
as I look at Mount Kearsarge
through the kitchen window
where you stood to watch the birds.
Often I came up behind you
and pushed against your bottom.
This year, home from unwrapping
presents with grandchildren
and children, sick with longing,
I press my penis
into zinc and butcherblock.