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Synecdoche is a problem. We let parts stand in for wholes, because we can handle parts, and we are overwhelmed by wholes. I'm not sure I've ever seen the whole of something in my life. Let me look at you, I say, and I look at your eyes. I look at your small, curled ears. I look at how you stretch your arms, like the white and purple blooms of an orchid, pushing outward toward life, and after all this time it's still unknowable what makes you flourish and what will make you withdraw. What is the whole of you? It's not what I can see.

Or maybe synecdoche is about mystery. When we let parts stand in for wholes, are we saying that we don't need all the rest, or are we saying that the rest can remain unknowable, we'll give it space to close in and to surprise us? Synecdoche is a problem, like a 1000-piece puzzle of Brueghel's Tower of Babel, and we tell ourselves we'll begin by piecing together the different wisps of clouds in the pale white-blue sky. We only notice how precisely tuned the sky is because we see the parts more clearly now, before we're forced again to regard the monolith at the center.

In Midwinter Day, we're asked to consider how one day might stand in for the many days, the life, the history, within which it occurs. How do the many days around it come to determine it? How does it come to determine the many days around it?

On December 22, 2018, the day I was invited to write within a constellation of poets writing about this day, I was in London, and I was worried that this day wouldn't be representative of my "normal" days at home in Utrecht. My family traveled to England to see the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition at the British Library (my spouse is a medievalist) and the Anni Albers retrospective at the Tate Modern (I am a modernist). We couldn't go during the normal winter break for our kids, as my spouse's ailing father wanted us to spend the holidays with him, so we took the kids out of school a few days early and took the train across the Channel.

That day in London, when I tried my best to write notes in our hotel room, on the Underground heading to the Victoria & Albert, in the bathroom during a restaurant dinner, was unusual, and yet it ended up bringing to the surface — even to a crisis — some of the underlying issues of my "normal" days at home in Utrecht. And the costs of that day (such as the unexpected 300 euro fine and interviews with the local "Compulsory Education Officer," because our children had missed school without administrative approval), as well as the gifts (children who not only know but remember seeing the Domesday Book), would only come to be known in the many days, months, probably years following. As Mayer writes when she begins her own day, "Lately you've been showing up a lot / I saw clearly / You were staying in the mirror with me."1 I'll let this part stand in for the whole, because the whole remains to be seen.

Mia You was born in Seoul, South Korea, grew up in Northern California, and now lives in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Her first full-length collection is I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016), and her poems also have appeared as a chapbook, Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007), and an artist's book, YOU (created by Thorsten Kiefer, 2004). She currently teaches creative writing and literature at the Universiteit Utrecht, after completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her essays and book reviews appear in Artforum, Bookforum, The Critical Flame, The Hairpin, Jacket2, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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