The Solstice Blues

 

Each year as the winter solstice draws near I feel the losses, feel them like some kind of arthritis of the spirit, and I find that I walk around on the customary streets and fall away from all that’s around me. This isn’t alienation. I don’t feel like the narrator of Pablo Neruda’s famous poem “Walking Around” who is sick of being a man even while he enters movie houses and tailor shops. This condition I experience has more to do with pagan grieving–as the days grow shorter I am less able to imagine eternal life in the Christian sense; more in mind of dead souls of the ones I’ve loved, mindful of their adjacent suspensions, imagining them like fish in Hades hanging in darkness.

Small wonder then that the Macy’s parade and the iridescent inflatable bubble gum mangers and the thousand Santa Clauses don’t help me. There are dead souls bumping against my ribcage and there’s a pull of stars I can feel in my eyelashes. And walking around I know that the problem (such as it is) has to do with my people for we have forgotten how to gather at the ends of the shortened days in winter. We don’t know how to honor the fish of Hades. Instead we practice loud affirmation, swelling with musical assurances, giving away delicate music boxes; all to feel right. But if you’re like me and you have 30 % of the pagan you don’t feel right. You have arthritis in the spirit as I’ve said and all the forced cheer of the Judeo-Christian festival won’t quite do. The pagan in me believes that the dead circulate; they are not secure in the many mansions of their father’s house, neither are they a mineral blank; they are moving like neural messages, cold or hot, flickering, pin prick and flare of matches, sad as notes from a Baroque mandolin. Last night, up late, my wife already asleep I wrote a short poem. I wanted to get the pagan grieving into focus. The poem doesn’t solve anything of course. It is an adjacent suspension for the ones who are near and unseeable. It is the solstice. The Finn in me needs to say so.

 

Solstice

 

Night and a baroque mandolin

Are equal—a conceit of drunks

Or the ineffably sad—sky so close

It calls the heart to shore

The mandolin upturned there, played

In weeds, played like light.

Call out our losses, saddle the horses,

Ask my father back from his grave,

Beg him, cry, Vivaldi and trillions of stars.

 

S.K.