Warm Days in January

Warm Days in January

BY DONALD REVELL

It has never been so easy to cry

openly or to acknowledge children.

Never before could I walk directly

to the center of an island city

feeling the automatism of millions

drawing one pious breath, shouldering

the sunset, holding it up in the oily

tree-line a while longer. Years ago,

I was never sad enough and nothing

but a hotel that I could tear to pieces

and reconstruct inside a shoebox

felt like home. My parents died. Their miserable

possessions washed up in other hotels,

dioramas of the febrile romantic.

I take my first lover, already

gray at her temples and more reticent

than shy, more tacit than admiring,

to the bus stop by the Jewish Museum.

We wait in the dark a long time.

She does not kiss me. She hurries

up out of the oily street onto the humming,

fluorescent podium of the last bus

where I see her a last time, not waving

to me, not lovable, erect in the freedom

we traduced years ago in our first kiss.

Never deny the power of withdrawal.

Never doubt that thought and time make things small.

Never refuse the easy exit line or prescribed

uncomprehending gesture. At childhood's end,

none can tell happiness from buoyancy.

None of it made any difference—

the patricides, the hotels ill-constructed,

the inconstant starlight of drugs and rebellion.

We are no more complicated

than our great-grandparents who dreaded

the hotel life. Like them, we seek the refuge

of warm days in January, a piety

whose compulsion is to survive according

to explicit laws no young woman adores

or young man follows with darling hunger.