There I was making a basket with the hem of my T-shirt pulled up to carry the fallen apples.
& then a distance shortened.
I’ll tell you what I don’t remember—
something fell out of me when I found out we all leave.
What was carefree dropped its shiny seeds into the sad of not-forever.
A loneliness, this anguish—
like moving through a wideness of air wingless.
*
DECEMBER 13TH
Taylor Swift & I have the same birthday. Everyone loves her, her lyrics so specific: the red scarf she left in her ex-boyfriend’s sister’s drawer, her pain finding a page & lifting into a song to fill a car, like a murmuration of memories whose underwings catch the sun & so the sky glistens with them, feathered & swelled over the bridge as I wait for the light to change. Now that I’m retired I slow down at yellow lights, have time to wait, I might see a bald eagle or find the perfect prime number on a license plate, time to look for saints & think about the close-to-gone, the snow’s forgiveness or string theory—there might be even smaller particles than the electrons we cannot see, tiny strings to name inside the tiniest thing—a raw almost-nothing vibrating. Sometimes I think I feel it or hear it. The way when I was five, I sat with Mrs. Stewart at her desk during nap time because I couldn’t sleep, the two of us in a dimmed, breathing room, a green gooseneck lamp arced between us, our pencils making marks, a small sound of lines & curves unearthing. Her face bent down, the pillow of breasts in a flowered dress. That infinitesimal vibration between us, between the page & me, between a gliding eagle & me, between the falling snow & me, between Taylor’s voice & me in this car on this Earth, everything a part of every string.
*
Sarah Dickenson Snyder carves in stone & rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has four poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), With a Polaroid Camera (2019), and Now These Three Remain (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2023). Poems have been nominated for Best of Net and Pushcart Prizes. Work is in Rattle, Verse Daily, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com
