Galway Kinnell's "The 26th of December"

Thoughts on this day and the next.

The 26th of December

A Tuesday, day of Tiw,
god of war, dawns in darkness.
The short holiday day of talking by the fire,
floating on snowshoes among
ancient self-pollarded maples,
visiting, being visited, giving
a rain gauge, receiving red socks,
watching snow buntings nearly over
their heads in snow stab at spirtled bits
of sunflower seeds the chickadees
hold with their feet to a bough
and hack apart, scattering debris
like sloppy butchers, is over.
Irregular life begins. Telephone calls,
Google searches, evasive letters,
complicated arrangements, faxes,
second thoughts, consultations,
e-mails, solemnly given kisses.


from Collected Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 2017)

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In the time I’ve spent writing this newsletter, I’ve often avoided any sort of thematic link between the day’s poem and the day itself. By that I mean — I don’t think I’ve ever posted a Christmas poem when my newsletter comes out near Christmas, or a Thanksgiving one when…you understand. However, as I type this, I am aware that this little newsletter will be sent to your inboxes on Christmas morning — whether you celebrate such a holiday or not — and, for some reason, Christmas makes me think of Galway Kinnell, and I’ve long loved this beautiful, critical, sharp poem of his. And so here, on Christmas morning, is a poem about tomorrow.

I think that I’m thinking of Kinnell’s work because, years ago, I wrote an essay about both his poems and my grandmother’s death. Kinnell has a poem — “Parkinson’s Disease” — where he writes, of his friend’s death:

it will be only a small dislocation 
for him to pass from this paradise into the next.

I think of that phrase — a small dislocation — often, and, when I first read that poem by Kinnell, I thought of the last time I saw my grandmother. She was sitting at her kitchen table, a small formica thing tucked beside a window. I don’t think her feet touched the ground. We — my father, my aunt, and I — were with her, watching her eat. She held a spoonful of maybe a few peas. The spoon trembled. She put it down. She didn’t want to eat. My father whispered to her. I had never really seen him whisper. It seemed a tender thing; it seemed a fragile moment. It seemed we all might disappear with her, lightly, just a small and gentle dislocation, the way the last leaf is blown gently from the tree after everything else has gone. My grandmother said she was scared. Her face was soft and large, barely above the table’s surface. Her body was small. She died a month later.

My grandmother lived in small house a few blocks from Lake Ontario in Irondequoit — a town just outside of Rochester, New York. I think of it as having one and a half floors. There was the ground floor, and then there were these green carpeted stairs that went up to what was half-floor-half-roof. In the darkness, I hit my head often against the ceiling’s steep downward slope. My grandmother raised my dad in that house, and five other kids. I don’t see much of that family often; both grandparents are now dead, and one aunt. I’ve never met one uncle, and haven’t seen another uncle in a decade, an aunt in over two decades. But mostly this is because my dad — the oldest of his siblings — had me later than any of his siblings had kids. He would drive my brother and I up to Rochester each Christmas, but many cousins and aunts and uncles were long since gone.

My dad taught me most of what I first learned about love through that drive from Washington, DC to Rochester. It took seven hours, and we often drove through the night a few days before Christmas. We’d make the same requisite stops: a Wendy’s near Harrisburg, a gas station on the New York state border where my dad would give me a fistful of bills, which I’d use to buy him his Coke and buy me some Necco Wafers, my brother some Mike and Ikes. I’d sit in the back, my brother in the front. And usually, as we snaked through New York state sometime around midnight, when the radio ran out of sports to listen to, or faded to static in the rock-cut and dynamited valleys, my dad would reach his hand back and pinch my leg, laughing as he did it, laughing as he said if I’m going to stay awake, then you are, too.

Years ago, I wrote and published a poem — “Elegy for the Long Drive” — about that drive, about my grandmother’s death and my father’s love. You can read it here. I’ll paste it below.

When pops aired his words over space
to tell me grandma had a heart attack
I couldn’t hear the quiver in his voice.

I had just bought coffee in Queens
for a dollar & the steam of it when held
close to me made the inside of my nose

sweat. You are someone made by her,
I wanted to say. Can you cry for me,
dad? But no, we talked quiet & stern

like two boys tucked away in the corner
of a schoolyard, pretending at something
larger than themselves. We are all

someone made. God is the space
between the last word of a sentence
& a question mark. A heart attack

is the shake a pen makes as it scribbles
along a page. It is all so very human.
Most nights, before sleep, I think

of the slow rolling heave of my father’s
gut, of the breathing in & breathing
out, of his hands, nearing the pigment-

drained, speckled stage of old age.
When my grandma dies, tonight
in a hospital bed, or tomorrow,

I will remember the hush of her slippers
as they shuffled across the floor. I will
begin a sentence with didn’t she or

isn’t this where or I can’t believe or
she was so. Notice the space where
I didn’t place a question mark. I don’t

believe in God anymore. I believe
in my father & that long drive years ago
through the white-out, where even the truckers

pulled to the side of the road, the snow
a steady horizontal machine of erasure,
where we passed through the names of towns

so plains-like & lilted I could’ve sworn
the snow pattering against the window
was the brush drum of the song we inhabited.

Painted Post. Cooper’s Plain. Savona.
My father turned the radio low & from
the backseat I marbled him into a statue

made of miles. Most people forget the woman
who shouted out at Jesus, blessed is the womb
that bore you. My father didn’t. Each winter

he drove back toward it under cover
of darkness. Each winter he taught me
without words how to write an elegy.

So that’s why I’m thinking of Galway Kinnell today. Because he reminds me of my grandmother, and her death, and because my grandmother reminds me of my father, and his love, and because — on this day of all days — I remember that love. I remember the long drive through the snow. It happened year after year until it didn’t happen. And so I remember it now. I remember my grandmother at the door, each year a little smaller, each year a little softer, a little gentler. Her head in the nook between my belly and my chest. I remember that. How love felt like both journey and arrival. How, I guess, love is a bit of departure, too. Because departure is what makes me say I remember. And what I remember is what I love.

Today’s poem might seem a simple one, but it does a few things that make me joyful for their craft. On a general level, today’s poem offers a duality, a juxtaposition. Essentially this: Christmas is over, and all that Christmas contained is gone with it, thus leaving us to do all that we did before, a series of small, maybe even inconsequential tasks that make up our daily busyness (and business).

What I love, though, about this poem’s craft is the way in which such a juxtaposition is conveyed and presented. Take these lines, for example:

The short holiday day of talking by the fire,
floating on snowshoes among
ancient self-pollarded maples,
visiting, being visited, giving
a rain gauge, receiving red socks,
watching snow buntings nearly over
their heads in snow stab at spirtled bits
of sunflower seeds the chickadees
hold with their feet to a bough
and hack apart, scattering debris
like sloppy butchers, is over.

This is hallmark Kinnell. Keenly aware of the natural world, full of movement between domestic life and botanic life and pastoral life and back again, and full, too, of language that fills the mouth. Stab at spirtled bits. Chickadees and debris. Talking then floating then visiting then giving then receiving then watching. A whole world is contained in these lines. Our world.

And the best part? It’s a single sentence, made purposefully awkward, jam-packed with movement and beauty. To be frank, I wish I could diagram it, because the core independent clause that makes up this sentence is, simply:

The short holiday day…is over.

To read this sentence, you have to hold those first words in your head as you move through the images that follow, some of which are so intensely and imaginatively described. It took me a couple tries to even know to link those final words — is over — to the ones that began the sentence. To complete the thought. This long, winding, stuffed-full-of-so-much sentence is followed by one terse sentence:

Irregular life begins.

Which is then followed by not even a sentence — just a list:

Telephone calls,
Google searches, evasive letters,
complicated arrangements, faxes,
second thoughts, consultations,
e-mails, solemnly given kisses.

Here is one way that Kinnell presents the juxtaposition between the “holiday day” and the day that follows, that day of “Irregular life.” For one, he doesn’t even honor the activities of “Irregular life” with the completeness of a sentence. They are fragmented, unable to come together to form a wholeness, a sense of coherence. And secondly, look at the length prescribed to each description of a day. The short holiday day takes up most of the poem — eleven lines, to be exact — while the day that follows takes up a mere five. These are seemingly simple choices on Kinnell’s part, but they do keen and lovely work.

And then there’s something else I noticed, which is that Kinnell presents almost the same amount of actions in each juxtaposed moment. I thought it might be fun to list them out. Here’s what I mean. In that first section, there are these listed actions:

1. talking by the fire
2. floating on snowshoes among ancient self-pollarded maples
3. visiting
4. being visited
5. giving a rain gauge
6. receiving red socks
7. watching snow buntings nearly over their heads in snow stab at spirtled bits of sunflower seeds the chickadees hold with their feet to a bough and hack apart, scattering debris like sloppy butchers

And in that second section, here are the listed actions:

1. Telephone calls
2. Google searches
3. evasive letters
4. complicated arrangements
5. faxes 
6. second thoughts
7. consultations
8. e-mails
9. solemnly given kisses

Though some of the things mentioned in the former list are mundane, such as “giving a rain gauge,” what stands out is that even the actions that take up the least space — “visiting” and “being visited” — hold a kind of important weight and value. And what also stands out is that Kinnell is able to — with a poet’s awareness and imagination — take as simple as an action as “watching” and allow it to blossom into this beautiful, funny, wholly developed scene of a miniature world of snow buntings and chickadees and so much else.

In comparison, the latter list’s actions become wildly inconsequential. They lose whatever meaning they might’ve had, and they also take on a sense of sudden strangeness. How, the poem seems to ask, did we move from visiting and being visited, from floating and giving and watching, to the quick and easy remove of the digital world, or the business world, or — in the midst of whatever world — the highly impersonal, inattentive, and solemn?

Maybe that is why Kinnell brings up the idea of war at the poem’s onset. Not just because it seems so at odds with the spirit of the holiday, but also because of the war — the sharp dichotomy — he presents in this poem. The war between the attentive and the inattentive, between the intimate and the distant, between the physical and the digital.

Such a comparison reminds me first of a line from Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk, where she writes:

This is what life is all about: salamanders, fiddle tunes, you and me and things, the split and burr of it all, the fizz into particulars.

It reminds me, too, of Jane Kenyon’s “Taking Down the Tree,” a kind of poem-companion for Kinnell’s. Kenyon’s speaker takes down the ornaments from the tree, ornaments that become simultaneously endowed with importance and yet almost fragilely ordinary in the act. What’s left, at the end, is just the tree. Kenyon writes:

By suppertime all that remains is the scent
of balsam fir. If it's darkness
we're having, let it be extravagant.

Both poems serve as reminders of what is intangible and valuable about this life. For Kenyon, it is that scent / of balsam fir, that idea of extravagance and wonder that, when noticed, becomes transcendent — what we remember and what we love. And for Kinnell, it is embedded in those verbs: talking, floating, giving, visiting, watching. So much else and so much more. Notice how, in that second list, none of those actions are presented as verbs. Instead, they are all nouns. They are fixed things, inactive. I think Kinnell thinks that we could walk away from them, in the same way that, it seems, we walk into them as we resume our business and busyness the day after Christmas. It’s a lovely thought, isn’t it? Even if it might feel overly simplified or impossible? I value the comparison, and how it asks me to look — again and again — at this world, at the difference between this day and the next.

In I and Thou, Martin Buber, nearly a hundred years ago, asked this question:

Don’t we find that modern developments have expunged almost every trace of a life in which human beings confront each other and have meaningful relationships?

Not long after, Buber says we live on the crust of thinghood, a strangely apt description of modern life. And I think, whether because of nostalgia or romance or whatever, there’s an opportunity on days like today to rekindle a sense of value with those verbs that Kinnell lists above. For some reason, days like today tend towards illumination. I remember being young, running on Christmas morning along Lakeshore Boulevard with Lake Ontario to my left, feeling like it — all of it — was a holy thing. Or, as I got older, feeling — in just sitting with her — that my grandmother was a holy person. And that there was something sacred about the small and light tracks of deer in the snow. What to do with that other than hold it? And remind myself of it as often as I can? Sometimes I forget. I’d like to forget less often.

And so, on this day, which is a holiday that you may or may not celebrate, I am trying to think again of my grandmother, to think again of my father. I am trying to think of the way my grandmother grew more tender as she aged, until she was so gentle that it seemed she only wanted to hug and be hugged. I am trying to think of the long drive my father made, and the gentle whisper — maybe the only whisper he’s ever whispered — he uttered as he tried to get her to live and love beside him just a little longer. I am trying to think of the soft, sometimes glistening fabric of where we live together, and how fragile it is, and how it moves in the light. I am trying to think of the light. It goes away so quickly now. So I am trying to think of it, and to pay attention to it for the short while it is here. And I am trying to think of these verbs: give, visit, receive, watch, talk, and float. I’d like to cherish them today and tomorrow. To act in them with and among people and the world. To make a life of them.

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A Note:

If you’re interested, I was interviewed by Denise Robbins (who reads this newsletter! thank you, Denise!) for a favorite website — The Creative Independent — which runs interviews of so many wonderful artists (including some recent favorites of mine: Bud Smith, Sasha Fletcher, Elisa Gabbert, Ocean Vuong and more). That interview seems to have brought this newsletter a number of new subscribers, so — thank you to all of you for being here, and for reading. There are now almost 2,500 of you! What a beautiful thing. I can’t believe it.

You can read Denise’s interview with me here.

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