Two Days in December
I wolfed.
Planted heather, long struggling in its pot, into the cold sandy ground, as the morning was gusty, bees at bay.
I walked with Jennifer, who lamented the quality of her brain. We came upon a grizzled possum head. “What’s the opposite of decapitated?” she said, “de-bodified?”
Allyson explained how to spell “cozy.”
The red-shouldered hawk flew low, loomed large, and grazed my head (hair heaped in a high nesty bun) and I smelled the heat of wildness, pounding wing.
I told Chuck in Portland we are a smiley people here and noticed he began experimenting with a sort of smile.
Jane called Ann Patchett “anodyne” and I asked her what does that word mean. “I will give you a very good definition,” she said, and she read from an online dictionary.
I drove past T.’s dark empty house. Later, driving by again, I let myself in with my key. The feeling of entering a tomb. I went to the freezer and took from the
upholstered box one chocolate. I took another, and into my mouth, both at once. The taste of cold wax and loneliness.
I told Mike I regretted criticizing the University of Phoenix and I would refrain in the future. “Don’t do that,” he said. “We’ll never have any fun!”
In the morning, it was too cold to work in the garden. In truth I did not put on proper clothes. My winter things, packed away, are for a smaller gardener.
I purchased make-up that I do not understand but Tik-Tok will teach me.
I tried to sharpen pencils. Disaster!
I said to the cashier, sincerely, “Stay warm!” and he laughed quite sincerely.
In the garden, I watched the gold-clawed hawk pounce and press and pounce—like a great cat with wings—on a nuthatch, who did not ever give up fluttering. The little bird was beak-stabbed, and flown up into the great branches of the oak tree, as a bit of tattered black and grey lace.
I sent Jennifer a comforting message in advance of her toe corn surgery (and vowed never to go sockless again).
I took a quiz on social connectedness, the great indicator of longevity, and I did much better than expected. Keep initiating!
I watched a nuthatch knit her way through the lilacs alone.
HEATHER SELLERS spent nearly two decades in Holland, Michigan, where she was a professor at Hope College. She’s the author, most recently, of How to Make Poems from Flip Learning, and two new collections of poetry, The Present State of the Garden and Field Notes from the Flood Zone. Her memoir, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, describes her experience with face blindness. Currently, she teaches poetry and nonfiction in the MFA program at the University of South Florida.
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