It's Christmas, And

It's Christmas and a remote control helicopter whirs above our heads (my little brothers' present to themselves). My mom cleans up the mess I'm making in the kitchen, caramelizing walnuts for a salad. She asks when the roast will be done: in response my dad throws up his hands, complaining he doesn't know the rate of temperature increase for a prime rib roast (but then he opens up Excel and starts plugging in numbers, making a graph of temperature over time as he sticks a thermometer into the meat). I'm not kidding, it's Christmas, and it's also the future. Grandma is asking where she can plug in her iPad and I'm instagramming ice skates sitting in our living room. It's Christmas, and it's Minnesota, and it's the future, and I'm not kidding, my parents got a new Christmas Tree that revolves mechanically. How it does that is some evil mystery I don't want to understand, but before we opened presents I grabbed some gratuitous b-roll of its robotic spin on my SLR for an unstarted project. Because soon it will be the future, and I'll want that. 

***

It's Christmas, and around the dinner table, I ask everyone to share their highlight from the past year: 

Grandma: "My highlight is that I'm still alive!"

Dad: "I have to say the hike we took on the Minnesota-Canada border."

Mom: "Not our 30th wedding anniversary vacation in the Caribbean?!? That's my highlight. I thought you were going to steal it."

Brother: "Learning to ride a motorcycle"

[parents chide; grandmas discuss her friends who've died in motorcycle accidents]

Grandma's boyfriend: "It has to be my first grandchild..." [launches monologue on 9-month-old Holland, who none of us know]

***

It's Christmas, and it's almost the New Year, which means I've been reflecting reflexively on the year that has passed. There have to be a dozen moments in as many months that are crystallized in my mind, hopefully forever. Three stand out.

1. January 2nd. I was writing while riding the PATH back to Newark in the morning The night before I met the girl who would become my first girlfriend. That was the moment I came out to myself. I've been a different person since that day. Fully me. 
2. February 10th. After hours of agonizing, I got a call and an offer to teach in Coney Island. There on the street I felt my life lurching towards Brooklyn, and it has. 
3. December 13th. At work I read an email informing me my poem was a finalist in a contest, and I felt, at long-last, a writer: a dream I'd had since age 8 fulfilled. 

It's Christmas! It's the future! And I have so much to be thankful for. 

Fireworks From a Distance

We sit side by side, the pretty girl and I.

Swallowed in the ink of early morning,
we sway on a second story porch swing
that creaks beneath our weight. Below,

the last of laughter, bleary eyed, drifts up

like cold smoke to where the yellow leaves
no longer hang. Rocking and unrocking in

the blackness, we listen to ourselves speak silly words
of waking up one day to find our bodies old. 
Already we are ancient, the supple skin of inner wrists
blueprinted with a map for veiny parchment.
Age is like the fireworks we watched from miles away,
in the stillness of early evening, hours ago,
the pounding bangs delayed by distance, crashing

ghost-like after the explosions bloomed and faded.

The lights, the smoke, the sounds have disappeared,
and now, the air is still and dark and sinks,

filling in the space between us, brooding.
Our words are notes that rise like blue balloons,
above the trees and power lines, they burst
too high above for us to catch the sound.

Still, it is another autumn past, and we’re strangers

dragging cold toes in damp sand, drawing maps

and making x’s, marking hometowns as we watch

the endless razor waves that leap against the shore. 

Coney Island

I.

There are no rabbits here. It feels like the end of the world
and it is, or at least the last stop on the way there. I wandered
here looking for something. I only found others like me,
caught in the settling red, the rabbit blood. We're all on the island,
getting more lost from the land, sunk in the sand and then drowning,
down, down. At dusk the housing projects look like giant Christmas trees,
with their rows of regular windows strung ten stories high.
I've been in those hallways, dark. Reeking of piss and smoke.

II.

I smoke until I'm made of it, every cell. It fits me well,
the darkness, redness. Sitting on a throne of rabbit bones,
I disappear. The last rabbit died here years ago, maybe centuries,
slaughtered by pleasure, the onslaught of hot dogs, boardwalks,
Dream Land, steamboats, ruts left by traveling freak shows.
This island is land that is lost. They call it the fun place.
They call it the end of the world. I'm in love with an island
that doesn't exist. Not even the bones of the rabbits are left here.
Atlantis sunk under the sea. So will we. It's already sinking
in redness, in a haze of vaporized rabbit blood, rabbit breath.
They called it a wonderland. Wanderers flocked by the drove. 

Half-Familiar

Look, all I’m saying is that sometimes
I can feel you there, alive, electric, on the
other side, and I know the way your heart
beats fast like mine does when you look
at water moving in the dark. It’s like being
in a plane and flying above your own
apartment, knowing that below you
there are people that you love, and
that if you drew a line between you
in that instant it would point straight
at a star or empty space, one of the two,
neither being better than the other. 
When the train comes up from underground
I always wonder for a second if I am on
the wrong one, taking me from where
I meant to go, but I’m only being anxious,
and I press my nose against the window so
that I can see the city silhouetted in the rain
behind my own reflection, the edges of my face
half-lit, all of it half-foreign, half-familiar.