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.

.