Warm Days in January

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.