The Listening by James Hoch

Snow again, I can’t hear it falling
in birches, yard, garden beds, heady
tufts and root down of winter carrots,
though I stare out there, as if
listening to the making. The way,
a kid, I’d rise in the middle of night
looking for my father, who was
as present as absence, the house
the usual dark I’d sleep walk through.
Eventually someone would find me
sitting on the living room floor,
W-sitting, snow on television, or
looking canvas-blank out a window,
eyes open but not seeing. Snowman,
they’d call, nudge me back from sleep,
silence cracking like a crocus—
The reveal, all that breaking, a kiss.
I don’t know if I loved anything more.
When my father died, a backhoe broke
the sky open, which filled with crows,
and a dusting coated the cars lining
the cemetery road. Snow falling
on my father’s death day, a little much
even to me, so prone to melancholy,
which is a way of skitching your loss.
Years ago, I had a friend, who used to say
love is a kind of opening.
She had a freezer stashed with vodka
and chocolate, a way of making me crash
on her couch. My friend was talking
about trees, what we know, what we feel,
how they conspire each other.
I was afraid then that if I stopped by
and listened long enough my body
would fly open, a blizzard of wings.
I thought that if I gave up grieving,
even one night, he’d die all over again,
or I’d die without something to grieve.
She must’ve known this too,
how winter shuts a mouth down,
then more mouth, more mouth.
Some days, the light right, I walk
an hour or so into a stand of birches
not far from my house, move through
the space between trees, and it’s like
the trees pass through me, the ghost
of my breath, my father, my friend
sitting on the couch in her apartment.
We are all there. I hear them talking
and want to slip off my shoes—
Snow, listening, the nerve to stay awhile,
it’s exactly like she was saying.

James Hoch’s books are Miscreants and A Parade of Hands. Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey is due in 2022 from LSU press. His poems have appeared in POETRY, The New Republic, Washington Post, Slate, Chronicle Review of Higher Education, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review and many other magazines, and has been selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2019. He has received fellowships from the NEA, Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers conferences, St Albans School for Boys, The Frost Place and Summer Literary Seminars. Currently, he is Professor of Creative Writing at Ramapo College of NJ and Guest Faculty at Sarah Lawrence.