Comings and Goings
Aug 23 2009


You return home
for weddings and funerals.
And in between, keep an eye on the weather
down East,
remembering
how you used to love a winter storm.
When traffic was snarled
school closed;
and snowflakes pelted horizontal,
turning streetlights
into snow-globes.
December wedding.
Funeral in May.

You come and go,
crossing time-zones, re-setting your watch,
as if propelled into the future
still jet-lagged, groggy;
or travelling back through time.
How absence
makes everyone look older.
How you feel far too young
in your childhood bedroom,
quickly regressing
to the rebellious daughter
the insolent son.

Funerals can’t be helped, of course,
And at least in May
the ground is soft
flowers, abundant.
But you can’t help wondering
who gets married in December,
in the stingy light
unforgiving cold.

Except it’s then you remember
the beauty
of freshly-fallen snow.
And the brand new year
just around the corner,
when everyone re-sets the clock
gets to start over.
And begins looking forward
to the first green shoots,
the final thaw.



This poem is about the malleability of time: how we effectively inhabit all the stages of life at once; how, in the geologic sweep of time, we are all essentially contemporaries, despite any difference in age, despite the conceit of the young. So there is a lot of playing around with conventions of time and age: in moving back and forth through them in both memory and space; in the inversion of expectation, with the winter wedding and the funeral in spring. In other words, the "comings and goings" here are both literal and metaphorical, physical and temporal.

There is also the malleability of perception: how the winter storm that, in the 1st stanza, is threatening and disruptive, becomes, in the last, full of beauty.

I think the last line is critical. The "final thaw" calls back to the previous stanza, to the interring of bodies in May's "soft" ground. This is the inevitable inexorability of the cycle of life -- which is easy to grasp intellectually, but we often fail to fully appreciate emotionally. So here, there may be newlyweds; there may be the anticipation of spring; but death still intervenes regardless, as suddenly sobering as the resonance contained in the closing line; and, in particular, in the word "final".