The Midwinter Constellation
It mattered to me that Midwinter Day was 40 because I was 40, too. I was fudging, a bit — just two weeks from my 41st birthday. Had I been born on my due date we wouldn't have shared 1978 at all. Electrifyingly personal secret pleasure. "This is the mathematics / I'm the mother and the poet" — rare enough — but I'm the baby too. In the years since becoming a mother I had been writing proprioceptively into time stamps, trying with all my senses to live in each discrete time-room. I couldn't have stood it all at once. Finally, I come to what Mayer knew all along: I start writing "to make the poem long and lifelike through spaces opening up." I feel so seen by Mayer's Day, but it's not personal.
Mayer is not 40 on her Midwinter Day. But it's the age she mentions most: Frank O'Hara's age when he was "killed in an accident on Fire Island." And on Ted Berrigan's "fortieth birthday," Mayer visited Chicago, "He made us cry and Edmund was crying too and Anselm was locked in his room in the morning because otherwise he wouldn't stay in bed just like Marie." O'Hara and Berrigan are both men who wrote poems with time stamps in them. O'Hara eternally on his lunch break: "Everything / suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of / a Thursday." But Mayer writes, "It's 12:15pm / Everything circumscribed" and then "It's 1:15pm / We're going home with what we can have to carry, / Having had to pay for it." Those are her only two.
Instead of stamping, Mayer marks through rigorous attendance: "Today I'm the present writer / At the present time the snow has come." There is everything to say about her shimmering present as she plays the syntax of the sentence against the logic of the line. How "at the present time" repeats without repetition, finishing the clause about the present writer, initiating the next clause about the snow. A caressing accumulation, a liminal specificity, concreteness and abstraction at once. The snow gives us the writer's body and maybe reminds us of our own. In the dream section, the mother becomes someone else by seeming to write. "She is a feather and I am a mother / There's no real words on paper, that's all / And if I seem to write them I'm another."
Two years later, re-reading our collaborative Midwinter Constellation I mis-recognize sections as my own. "People all around me / wondering what it is I write." What day do we enter, together? Emerson says that the poet "will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune." I wonder and wonder how this actually works. I catch myself turning the pages of Midwinter Day without breathing; I am backing up to sit with each named storefront, conjuring. The potential for collectivity in the proliferating particular. In an interview with Stephanie Anderson, Mayer describes a Living Theater performance in which the artists just lived in a storefront: "I used to go and look at them every day, living their lives. What could be finer?"
Stefania Heim is author of the poetry collections Hour Book (Ahsahta Press, 2019) and A Table That Goes On for Miles (Switchback Books, 2014) and translator of Geometry of Shadows: Giorgio de Chirico's Italian Poems (A Public Space Books, 2019). Her essays and scholarship have appeared or are forthcoming in venues including Journal of Modern Literature, Textual Practice, the edited volume 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the 19th Century Archive, and through Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. She is a former poetry editor at Boston Review, a founding editor of CIRCUMFERENCE: Poetry in Translation, and teaches as an Assistant Professor in literature at Western Washington University.
