Solstice poem

From this morning's Zoom session.

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Birth

Today, on the solstice
the snow is thick as the white fat peeled from under the skin
of the sacrifice, or anyway the meal.
The clear liquor of it is on our mouths
Fragrant, obscene, and delicious.

And afterwards, walking it off, as we say
each step is a threshold, a transformation, a gamble
and maybe this is better than wishing
for some greater transformation.

After the first time, you have to do it all yourself
without any obvious portals between dimensions
without anyone switching on the lights
to let you know that this is a new world now, again.

And the body inside its own gates will not again
give or receive such clear messages of arrival and welcome
that first music high and pure
will not play again—

Never except once, at the beginning
or the end, depending on how you see it,
of this long winter.

Solstice writing

Also from today's session -- a little part-documentary, part-fantasy born of the snowstorm.

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The daytime snow was blue and gold, not white at all, but polarized and luminous. And when night fell, it wasn’t dark. The snow’s trillion tiny mirrors, and the low massed clouds, and the light pollution of course, collaborated to make the street almost as bright as it was in the afternoon, but closer, almost an interior, the inside of a long low tunnel of ice.

Our area has poor street lighting, poles too far apart and too tall, lamps often burnt out, so the night before winter solstice was brighter than any summer night. This made the winter seem like a time not of darkness but of evening things out, a reversion towards the mean.

The city bought those flawed bulbs everyone is talking about, the ones that turn purple as they age. They dyed the street a pale artificial violet. It was beautiful. It made you smell perfume in the cold air, lilac and lavender, scents of spring and late summer.

People trod up and down the gritty ruts in the snowy road, so pleased with the job they’d done shoveling the sidewalk that they didn’t want to walk there. Only a few houses had that bright festive smear of blue or green from thrown-down road salt. You assumed they needed to do it, but you worried about the animals.

Like the yearling deer that came high-stepping delicately among the drifts, swinging her head in perplexity, or the small black dog like a liquid shadow, a little splash of dark water, streaming towards home.