Sunday, December 18, 2016

My Christmas Lady


Is there a poem in her?
I don’t know. I never know.
I watched it snow the other day.
Looking at the calendar it’s clear
it is that Christmas time of year
to which I know no gift to bring
except my own defense against it.
Why? I don’t know why.

When my mother died,
Christmas stopped, like a clock.
I know that sounds like a response to shock.
But no, I never savored Christmas.
It was for some idea of a suburban family,
not for me. The only reason for the season
I could see was to believe in it enough
to carry out whatever stuff would show
I loved that it had meaning to my mother.
Which it did, and I did.

Christmas left when she left.
Neither loss left me bereft.
My mother’s life was gorgeously complete.
Now Christmas wouldn’t be there to deplete
me. Except it does.

Drawing turns out always to be ready
with reaction to this sort of fuzz
and never an abstract one.

Just now from under my massaging pencil’s
ministrations I was favored by the confident
appearance of a lady with thick blue hair flying back
and warmly dressed for winter in a mix of hues
for Christmas. She’s staring straight ahead at nothing
I make out, unless it is the abstract angled vaguely
human-sized-and-shaped suggestion of a form,
vertical and phallic, glowing with more colors of the sun
than any other thing or one around them was.
The woman’s mittens look a bit like boxing gloves.

My large gray cat Macgillicuddy sometimes cuddled with me
on my bed when I was sick or in the quick of dreading
something I had done would be discovered and uncovered
and I’d feel the freezing gust of somebody’s disgust with me.
Another ghostly tale perhaps of buried psychoanalytic truth.
But I remember hearing rain fall on the roof and feeling
animally free with my gray cat obliviously purring next to me.

So yes, I do remember this.
What it has to do with Christmas,
I don’t know –  unless maybe
it’s refracted in my Christmas lady.

.

No comments: