has always felt distinct to me,
the quiet of the week between Christmas and the new year.
Here’s a poem I’ve never published
that’s been on my mind—
Poem for the End of the Year
The year comes back, or won’t let go.
December in the quietest hours, Monday evening,
dark before its time. The letters arrive
in cold bundles: greetings, cards, late notes
from high school social chairs
all bringing the same news: the places we belonged to
grasp toward us from the past,
trapped in their time.
It’s good to think about those you haven’t
thought of in a while. I think down
into my childhood: Sierra Lurie
twirling in December
at the bluegrass gathering
in the cavernous tent. I watched her spin
amidst the candles,
though she hardly knew I existed.
Years later and there’s smoke
coming from the hospital grates,
a street of dead traffic lights,
a pale trail in the darkening sky.
You can feel how close it is to the solstice:
The trains moan from far away,
the thin cranes rise like scaffolding
for spaceships awaiting departure,
the shopkeepers in their empty stores
gaze through their phones,
lonely for anything.
I feel sometimes how unreal
the lives of strangers are.
I try to imagine their front doors,
their faces around a kitchen table,
the people that they love,
the beds in which they sleep.
I want their lives, in this way,
to become more knowable.
I speak to you earnestly from this cold late date
though my complaints seem vapid. I miss
my sister. I miss those I once knew. I’m lonely
for places I once existed in
inside the past.
Sierra’s father’s name is on all the city’s hospitals.
His daughter took her life. I think about that
sometimes: If she’d been given more
kindness. If the phone had rung that afternoon
as she sat on her bed and considered what to do.
I have to imagine it. The dead don’t rise
like marionettes. The sky stays furrowed
and goes on forever. It is Monday night
in the empty kitchens. The line of gravestones
stick up in the dark like raised hands.