It Cometh

It cometh. The snow. Pinprick flakes flicking at necks and cuffs, threads of cold air at the nostril and the upper lip below the moustache. It cometh. Cookies and baskets wrapped in stiff saran, holiday specials chalked onto boards, pumpkin spice syrup swirled into warm milk, Christmas carols like a lingering ocean of sound suspended above. Then more snow and thicker and the tires not finding the dirty ground fast enough so tracks are barely there, slight as snail trail on a jungle leaf.

In the mornings after I shower, I stand in front of the mirror. I brush my teeth, take my small green pill, massage lotion into my face, then a little blush and a little mascara, then deodorant. All the while, I watch you in the mirror. Behind me, Daddy lies in the bed, his knees a mountain of comforter and you on top. Usually Daddy holds you upright so that you can stand, stiffening and then relaxing your legs, stirring little whirlpools in the air with your hands. It must be odd to see two versions of your mother at the same time, one facing you and the other turned away.

Cometh the Christmas cards to sign, cometh the address labels and the extra block of cheese, cometh the fishtail and the 180, cometh the live Nativity and the empty cradle, filling with snow. Cometh milk and honey, water and wine, cometh the wassail and rum, the rooms at the inn and the rose-scent of the florist buttressing the purified smell of snow-crested outdoors.

Your head held higher, stronger, longer. Your mind beginning to learn control of your hands. At the base of your skull, your fine dark hair is thickest, fanning out along the collars of your sleepers.

I am thinking of Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" today as I often do at this time of year. Here is the last stanza:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
and I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death;
But had thought they were different; this birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

I love this passage for the way it keeps turning, cannot quite decide what it thinks of birth and death. And there is birth and death AND Birth and Death, the story of Jesus's life linked to ours but also different somehow. A proper noun. The Christian calendar tries to keep these events, Christmas and Easter, far apart from one another but in the poem they happen at the same time.
Simultaneously, the ending contained in the beginning.

After Christmas Fest, your father complained about the theology of the hymns. I tuned him out at the time, I think because on Law and Order they were matching two bullet fragments, side by side, under a microscope, which seemed a more crucial thing to observe--but what he meant was that the Fest was too happy, all about glory and victory and light. No edge, no hardness. "The light shines in the darkness," yes, but we would not be able to recognize the light without the darkness that surrounds us.

I think about death much more since your birth, Thisbe. I feel in myself a subtle turn. My job now is to support, uphold, prolong your life as much as I can, by own life is secondary. Your small body deep in the heart of the light and mine moving imperceptibly closer to the shadowed edge. It cometh.