In December


In December, the absurdity of 
life can look beautiful, a roiling 
landscape seized stone-still in a silver frame.
The year will taper down to one cold morning 
with air still as a postcard’s, behind pines
and slanting roofs a flawless blue that never 
suffered smoke, proof even against bombers.  
Snow whitens the grass like confectioner’s 
sugar.  Once more the night will have worked its 
lustration, as though every branch were fashioned
anew one second before dawn.  Here’s your
world.  We make no claim that it is other 
than absurd, but here it is.  A meteor 
may be hurtling toward it, its axis may 
tip, oceans rise, pestilence brew in its
venomous forests, but here it is, for now.  

Difficulties of the month.  We and our 
days zigzag like doomed railway cars against 
the brick wall of gaiety and some derail 
even in pastoral hamlets scented with  
wood smoke; the preparation/completion 
ratio soars above a hundred to 
one, all the cooking and spending thickened
by memory, sweetened by ads to an 
anxiously nostalgic nog; the senses 
reel from hackneyed tunes, the lights and smell of 
balsam, the flakes, the cold days short like jabs, 
dispiriting tinsel, fog, and the rude  
onslaught of the malls.  You can’t help feeling 
the Saturnalia is gravid with its
own destruction’s seeds, that the crescendo 
will be a wreck of expectancy, a 
ruin of forced smiles and parched spruce; for 
there’s no solution to a holiday.

After cocktails and supper Chaplin did 
impressions on demand.  Harry Lauder, 
Woodrow Wilson—people would call out the 
famous living names. Caruso! someone
shouted once, and Charlie did Puccini 
up a treat.  Oh, Mr. Chaplin, fawned a 
starlet, I’d no idea you’ve such a lovely
voice.  Chaplin grinned.  But I don’t, my dear. 
I was only imitating Caruso.  
No matter how cold, in glad December
you can do impressions of the happy.

“In December” first appeared in Poem.


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24 Kislev


One adolescent December, fingering 
away last year’s wax from the family menorah, 
it struck me that I’d have chosen the wrong side, 
would have yearned to join the city scholars,
not those zealots in the hills.  The Symposium 
and Sappho, Miltiades and the Cyclops, 
Achilles and the Argonauts’ adventures 
would surely have inveigled me away from  
the strictures of the Law.  Before the prophets’ 
and my father’s scolding I’d have preferred the 
discourse of the gymnasia, sought my
freedom in wrestling, tossing disks, the gags of
Aristophanes.  Even Epicurus’ 
faithlessness might feel like deliverance from 
the strait and pared down life of the circumcised. 

Earth mothers always throw the best parties, the 
sort that make sky gods scowl.  Backsliding 
belongs to tradition as much as remorse 
or the miracle of everlasting light.

“24 Kislev” first appeared in Stonecoast Review.