12-22-2025
Didi Jackson
LATE DECEMBER
A new year arrives, distant like my fingertips
backlit by a flashlight, like a robin’s
twilight canticle, like the few feathers
from a kill discarded at the base
of the laurel, like notes of a bosc pear
rotting in the bowl, like the stray dog’s quiver,
like a rare slice of steak, like the dried
hydrangea from the memorial, like the paper
wasp’s perfect geometric guild, like the image
I reflect back to God, like an infection
of distemper and Lyme, like the thread-thin
bones in the wild caught salmon,
like the crunch of those bones in my mouth,
like the last tiny white stone placed atop the cairn
at the edge of the field, like that stone
falling the next day, like picking that stone
up and placing it on the top of the stack again.
THE LEISURE OF SNOW
With the leisure of the snow
falling like a Rothko
over the morning, I am astonished.
Although chickadee and titmouse flurry
to the feeder, they do so as timid as winter light
which daily asks for a little more patience
in order to emerge from the frigid night.
The flakes tumble as slow as prophecy,
occasionally buoyant on an invisible breath.
I do not suffer insomnia. I prefer to beat
the dawn; but this I shouldn’t have to explain:
for the morning is naked and beautiful
and yawns many times before turning
on the light. I am there
to see. The birds drop in and out
like lures in a dark ocean littered
with loitering stars. What a drowsy way
to start the day with the silence of God.
THE FIRST BIRD
The first bird I see in the brand-new year
is a chickadee, and according to birders
it is now my theme bird, industrious, curious,
no jukebox of melody but instead a 2 or 3 note
simple song, the dropped tones of hey sweetie
outside our bedroom window where we rest
a moment, naked, our desire rooting us to each other,
our ankles like anchors, your coined eyes
on my Willendorf figure, my freckles
like splashes of sweet vermouth. It is winter and the heat
of the room tricks us into cracking a window
to allow the smallest ribbon of yellow to touch
the bed, then to move across your face
like a honeyed blessing of mercy. I know the days
of the calendar itch like fledglings, each at the lip
of their nest, ready for flight; and that your parents
told you not to wish your life away,
but how esoteric of them, the old, though now
we are the age they were. Lip to lip. Nose to nose.
Belly to belly. And on this cold day, I want
to eat you. An excoriation of your body
in the manner of the eucharist.
For if you become part of me,
then I will know and help carry all
of your suffering, and you mine.
-from My Infinity by Didi Jackson--celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Founder and Editor, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
Didi Jackson is the author of the poetry collections My Infinity (2024) and Moon Jar (2020). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bomb, The New Yorker, and Oxford American among other journals and magazines. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee and teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University.
