I haven’t posted any poetry on the new blog site, have I? Well today is Imbolc, and evidently there’s a silent poetry reading in cyberspace today in celebration of the Feast of Brigid. I’m not a member of the pagan net and I only just heard of Imbolc for the first time, but I love me some poetry. I am told that today is sort of akin to the winter solstice, an occasion to declare intentions for the new year again, which I’ve already done in prose form on this blog, so I spent a little while looking around for a poem that might fit the occasion, and decided that there were a few from The Alphabet of Desire by Barbara Hamby that I would choose from to read aloud at a gathering tonight if given the chance, even though none of them’s quite exactly on that theme. I think “The Dream of the Red Drink” is properly epiphanic.

Barbara Hamby, The Alphabet of Desire

The Dream of the Red Drink

This story begins, as they so often do, with heartbreak.

I am at a party for a young man whose wife has left him,

   so he's abandoning graduate school to join the navy.

There is a lot of despair at this gathering,

   the young man's and the impoverished students'

and, of course, mine, which has less to do with money

   and more to do with time,

which is running out, in case you hadn't noticed.

And then there is the red drink.

Our host looks as if he has just stepped out

   of a Trollope novel, a nineteenth-century cleric

in rumpled chinos and a tee shirt.

   He and a friend have driven to Georgia

to buy grain alcohol and have mixed it with red Kool-Aid

   in a styrofoam container on the back porch.

Later when this party is famous, I learn the red drink

   eventually ate through the styrofoam,

but this was not discovered until the next day

   or maybe the next week when heads had finally cleared.

My host warns me not to drink much.

I don't, but I drink enough.

I don't know anyone at this party but the red drink

   makes me intrepid.

I talk to many people, make jokes, see God.

How many times can you see God before you realize

   his face is different every time?

Is this a revelation? Maybe.

Not only do I see God, but I see through him

   to the other side, though probably it's a vision

   of cerebral matter being sloughed off,

and I have a tête-à-tête with my most persistent epiphany,

   that is, life is nothing, rien, nada, niente.

I find it incredibly comforting to know

   the world is transparent,

   insubstantial, without meaning.

I think of Niels Bohr's assertion that there is no deep

   reality, and I know exactly what he means.

I am looking through the woman I am talking to,

   seeing through her

   to the soft bank of azalea bushes behind.

It's a nice effect, rather like a double exposure.

My husband is at this party, but I am avoiding him

   for a reason I can't really remember.

Oh, I remember, but it's too tedious to go into here.

I look at this man whom I love to distraction

   and wonder how he can be so utterly dense,

and I know if I say anything he will say

   I've had too much to drink, which is entirely correct,

and that there's alcoholism in my family, but show me a family

   that doesn't have a drinker or two. . . .

My beloved is in a cluster of beautiful students

   who think he's marvelous, which he is.

Wait a minute, girls, I could tell you things,

   but the red drink has turned ethereal on me,

and it's two-thirty in the morning and the young man

   who's going into the navy is delirious or dead,

and the lovely students have disappeared

   into their enchanted student hovels.

So we leave and the car seems flimsy, as if made from

   cardboard, like the East German cars about which

I saw a documentary in a hotel room in Tampa:

   after World War II the East Germans didn't have any steel,

so they made cars out of cotton wool compressed

   between layers of organic plastic

   that has proved to be almost completely unbiodegragable.

I look out into the night and think, this could be East Berlin,

   except it so obviously isn't, unless magnolias

and enormous oaks dripping with Spanish moss have been sighted

   on the Alexaderplatz.

But we are in motion and I sit in my seat, pulled through

   the night as if by a magnet

to an intersection in which I see that a low-slung black

   Oldsmobile will run a red light

and plow into my side of our flimsy East German car

  and the metaphysical and the physical worlds will have

to come to some kind of decision about my corporeal frame,

   and I think that maybe I don't want to walk

   into that good night just yet.

I say to my husband, "That black car's not going to stop,"

and he slows down, even though we have the green light,

   because I have authority in my voice,

authority bestowed on me by the red drink; in fact, I believe

   the red drink has made me slightly psychic,

   because the black car doesn't stop.

We watch it sail through the deserted early-morning

   intersection with wonder and astonishment,

   or at least I do

for Death has passed me by, its chariot zooming toward Perry,

   Florida, driven by a laughing young man with an Elvis

   haircut and his blonde teenaged girlfriend.

Time passes, probably a few minutes, but it seems

   interminable hours have stretched out before us.

We continue through the now-empty intersection,

   down an oak-lined street,

and turn to drive through the park,

but a red fox is in the middle of the rumpled

asphalt and stares into our headlights.

   He has a message for me and for my husband

and the pretty spellbound students

   and our Trollopian host

and the unconscious soon-to-be ensign,

   and I should be able to hear it clearly,

but I'm too giddy with being alive,

   my arms still chilled from the sleeve of death.