Anniversary by Carlie Hoffman
The girl stands on a street corner facing the high school.
It is Sunday, but out front a custodian uses a wooden broom
to clear the fallen leaves into trash bags.
She could have gone anywhere.
To the church, an empty field, to the overpass
near the school, but instead she chose here,
late November, wearing her black coat,
a rose from the city in her hand.
Today, eight years ago, she must have been doing
something important,
but she can’t quite remember what.
Waiting in line with her mother at the market
to purchase the last good apples
of autumn, or staring in a mirror at the plaza
while getting a haircut.
She watches in the cold as the old man knots
shut the top of a filled bag, then makes his way
from the far end of the street inward.
She can’t help but desire to hate him,
his cut knuckles, his cheeks
fevered from the song of working quickly against wind.
She hates him for not pausing
to see her, for the decades of furniture
that separate them, for doing wrong by sleep.
He keeps on sweeping the leaves into blond piles
like dead hair on a barber’s floor, not looking up
at the girl, the scrap of town, the detail of snow
beginning in the branches.
This is the only lesson: Without darkness
there is no music. Through December
she will pray hard beside the window,
toward the ancient trees, people drifting by
out of habit, out of getting on,
the foreign hum of bootsteps.
A prayer that someday she can use this,
that somehow, in the middle, she will wake
styled in the fire and wet light
of winter stars, deciding to begin. Art by Marc Figueras
Recommended listening: Harry Potter - Hedwig's Theme (Berklee College of Music)
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