Christmas Away from Home

By Jane Kenyon 1947–1995 Jane Kenyon

Her sickness brought me to Connecticut.

Mornings I walk the dog: that part of life

is intact. Who's painted, who's insulated

or put siding on, who's burned the lawn

with lime—that's the news on Ardmore Street.

The leaves of the neighbor's respectable

rhododendrons curl under in the cold.

He has backed the car

through the white nimbus of its exhaust

and disappeared for the day.

In the hiatus between mayors

the city has left leaves in the gutters,

and passing cars lift them in maelstroms.

We pass the house two doors down, the one

with the wildest lights in the neighborhood,

an establishment without irony.

All summer their putto empties a water jar,

their St. Francis feeds the birds.

Now it's angels, festoons, waist-high

candles, and swans pulling sleighs.

Two hundred miles north I'd let the dog

run among birches and the black shade of pines.

I miss the hills, the woods and stony

streams, where the swish of jacket sleeves

against my sides seems loud, and a crow

caws sleepily at dawn.

By now the streams must run under a skin

of ice, white air-bubbles passing erratically,

like blood cells through a vein. Soon the mail,

forwarded, will begin to reach me here.

Source: Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2005)

Biography

New Hampshire's poet laureate at the time of her untimely death at age forty-seven, Jane Kenyon was noted for verse that probed the inner psyche, particularly with regard to her own battle against the depression that lasted throughout much of her adult life. Writing for the last two decades of her life at her farm in northern New England, Kenyon is also remembered for her stoic portraits of domestic and rural life; as essayist . . .

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