"The Great Exhale"

               Festive lights gleam coldly from eaves, as sharp and as bright as wounding knives against this backdrop of snow. The air is crisp and cold, not unpleasantly so. It is Christmas, and my head is full of poetry; snippets of Yeats, and a song by the Great Lake Swimmers rattles around in my brain.

                The borrowed car I am driving slices the dark, lighting a cut fir tree. It fills the ditch, the detritus of this season of largesse already falling by the wayside. I am feeling reflective. As quick as that thought, I smile, remembering a girl, a friend, who told me that I “think the fuck out of everything.” She is young, a decade shy of my own age, which might explain it. Maybe this preoccupation I have on reflection, on memory, is the gift of age. Maybe it is just a symptom of my own private neurosis, making me a sort of sombre Jack Handy.

                Winter, and it is truly winter, the solstice having been freshly spent, is a season for deepened thought and poetry. It is a time of impatient suns, of crystal landscapes, and of long nights. I get out of the car. I am not at home, but I want to breathe in the cold, feel it in my lungs. Distant coyotes can be heard coughing out their distinctive barks, impossible to say how many fields away. Sound moves differently over snow, carries further.

                The state of my grandfather is bothering me. He is old, in his mind and in his body. His voice at the festive table was heavy, slurred with age and dentures. His body appearing shrunken, his vital fires ebbing. Days later we are to learn that he suffered a stroke this Christmas, but there in the dark I am not privy to that knowledge. It served to make the day less merry, although there had been laughter and smiles, genuine good will. Worry, though, was there, is there, an undercurrent to the season.

                The short, sharp barks sound louder, the coyotes moving closer, although I can’t be sure. The rail trail is close, and I consider taking it. I don’t have my boots with me, though, and the thought of snow in my shoes serves to still the ambition.

                I don’t know what I am here to dwell upon. I know that the crisp night warms me even as it ices my nostrils. I know that the distant constellations of bright lights across the fields house holiday gatherings, and celebrations. I know that, at least to me, my grandfather has become a living reminder of the Yeats classic “Sailing to Byzantium”; he has become a frail old man, a “tattered coat on a stick”, although I also know that he was a man who had danced under the stars, all youth and vitality. I know that we are all of us “drawing over the luminous veil” after our years of radiance and years of rain.

                It is December 25. The solstice is over, Christ is remembered, and a new year stands in the offing, looming. I stand alone in the night, smelling the cold. Primitive blood responds to the night songs of canines. Poetry fills my mind. And I am thinking the fuck out of everything.