Christmas Poem: TRAVEL NOTES ON COMING BACK TO LIFE

V.B. Price is taking a two-week holiday break. This is Price’s 51st Christmas poem. The previous 50 poems have recently been compiled into a book, Innocence Regained: Christmas Poems, now available through Casa Urraca Press.

Christmas 2020

WAKING UP,
plucked from the void, a new
stretch of mind, all yours
to fill, all yours, and already
partially behind you, the only
actual possession you have:
the world moving through you.

COMING BACK TO LIFE,
you might feel
the full
dark
miracle,
magnificent
with galaxies,
geodes, a chambered nautilus,
jelly fish, island forests,
mountain snow
and gold finches in the thorns.
And you want
all the gifts, all of them
you never knew were given
until death dumped you
awake again
to everything
you’d thought
nothing of
before.

TIME FOLDS ITSELF UP.
You can’t unfold it
without tearing it apart.
Never forget
what it might mean
to be dead.

YOU KISSED HER FOREHEAD,
you said the love charms
in her ear, you looked upon
her eyelids, shut so tight,
not sunken yet, but soon,
yellow and dark, as if her eyes,
once flowers of light,
were withering in the cold
blank tunnel of her dying.

SUPPOSE YOUR HEART STOPS,
you’re unaccountably blank,
blank to the world, blank
to yourself, but then
you’re plucked, like a kid
from a riptide, alive,
no longer blank, like the day
when death, present
as ever, strummed your ear
while you were kissing and said
“live, I am coming.”

LET’S SAY THAT HAPPENED,
a Lazarus tale,
arising, without
any memory
of being gone,
life dawning,
on you again.
What does it mean?
It wasn’t a long
trip into the zero.
I didn’t slide for hours
through ice sheets
of foggy eyes.
I didn’t encounter
the rose of light
at the center of heaven.
I slipped in and out
in a flash of darkness,
an anomaly,
a fatal stubbing
of the toe, but not.

JUST BEING AWAKE
in the world of trees,
of brains alive,
of war and pain,
of mulberries
and lawns
of flax and Maximillian’s,
just being awake
opens it all,
all of it
available
for you, all of it,
however
much of it
you can stand.

YOU KNOW THAT ANY LIFE
can stop at any second. It’s a knowing
that doesn’t make you more alive,
with a keener sense of danger,
but you do get better at tightrope walking
over the abyss on a sunny day
barefoot on a soggy rope. That’s where
all the best dancing you have to give
has to be done, simple as breathing
“thank you, thank you, thank you” forever
into the empty yawning of what was once
the solace of your shameful boredom.

THE MORNING RESSURECTION
is true. This every day
reappearance on the stage
of the way the world is,
this is our life as it is lived
before it is over, before there is an after
to all our losses, all our exiles, before we can regret
having been too stingy to pay attention before our life
is threatened with its end
that just happens
like anything else.

LIFE SPREADS OUT BEFORE US,
the whole realm of being.
It’s all here in all its ways
and always will be
until the body leaves
and takes us with it.
Each time we die
to our fears, die
to our doubts, die
to our shabby indifference,
life takes us over, fills us
with everything,
edge to edge, like light
takes up the sky.

We know. Don’t
waste a moment.
Death is always
a moment too soon.