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Birthday with Many Antecedents
by Michael Foster
1.
When I was here the first time
the long, gentle slope followed
by a long, gentle slope and another
and then another until they reached
the highway, distant but visible,
was deeply covered with snow, soon
to be covered in new snow just
beginning to fall. Biting cold impelled
us through our grave affair. Today
the undulate expanse is dotted
with blue canopies–tents the man
in the plaid blazer he shouldn’t try
to button says as he gives directions
pointing alternately across the winter
brown of grass and to the photocopied
map on which he has marked in red
W. 28, B-1 and my father’s DOB
and DOD. The royal blue canopies
preen beneath the late November
sky, clear-eyed and crisply blue,
mottled with the warm sun, a lingering
moon, and two or three wispy clouds.
They direct attention to the temporary
sites where they will stand a day or two
before moving on.
2.
The time is come, it occurs to me,
to count up the things I know: that
I will never comprehend the link
(leaving aside the tediously abstract
one) between the leaf that falls now, first
toward the loropetalum, then, caught
in a seasonal breeze, settling on a bed
of wild sweet william, and the one that fell
in the same place last year and the year
before that and all the years before
and the ones yet to fall in those years
I take pains not to consider because
they won’t belong to me; that memory
is an uncertain friend, a cold, withholding
lover, a cruel master; another thing,
something about forgiveness I haven’t
completely worked out yet; and the certainty,
now fading, that the sundry things I
placed on this list actually belong there
just as there was, I now acknowledge,
private truth in my wife’s aunt’s assertion,
repeated often and emphatically
regarding the King James Version:
it was good enough for the apostles
it’s good enough for me.
3.
The middle of December comes
before the first insinuation
of winter: that faint, cold smell
to the air, a sky that is somber—
not merely overcast—the quickening
wind.
4.
Then, time slowed. Which is
to say my way of measuring
time caused it to seem
to slow. On the quiet day
of the year, the day after Christmas,
time comes for me to attempt
simply to remember those things
I have long strived to understand:
how the leaf, arcing as it fell,
looked like a heart at play;
how hearts at play have fallen;
how the poem, this time, has
come painfully slow as if the late
arrival of winter paces everything.
5.
The birthday in the title came
in the first week of November.
In the time since then
I’ve made two brief
lists, considered twice
one leaf falling, first toward
the loropetalum, then away
and last night, sleeping fitfully,
had a dream which found me
oddly bored in a place with rivers
that flow uphill and stones that burgeon
and flower.
6.
The birthday served
to file another year
away. Christmas
brought its customary
measure of warmth.
But I haven’t
understood anything
remembered anything
not with the clarity I wanted—
a clarity that defeats time.
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