January
by Andy Eaton
Last night after dishes, our house
quiet. I was reading and you
from somewhere down the hall
came up with both hands over
your face. So we walked together
to the bathroom. And I saw down
at the scoop in the back of the porcelain,
our baby comma. A russet pebble
color stilled in clear water, meager
mass at rest, dropped like a ring.
Floor tiles hard and cold made our voices
sound like glass breaking, and that clang
and flush we heard like a clang and roll
of thunder off the rim of the sea.
The poem 鈥淛anuary鈥� arrived during many years of grief over wanting children. After all the losses, another. The next night I sat down and was by some grace given the words I had needed to say what I had been feeling, and finally to feel what I had needed to say. This is a poem from the voice of the one who hopes and grieves alongside.
For some time I had tried to place this as the second half of a poem. A trusted friend said I didn鈥檛 need the first part. I cut it, and waited. The more I read this version, the more clearly I heard the poem being itself. It was a lesson in listening and trusting your voice, the poem, what is given.
The poem holds within it the idea of turning. January, that month of turning from one year to the other. Janus, the face in two directions, two dispositions. Rings, cycles, waves. We looked together and didn鈥檛 fully know what we were seeing, though it might as well have been our lives.
Andy Eaton is the author of Sprung Nocturne. His poems appear in The Iowa聽 Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review, among other places. Recipient of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Award in Poetry, he is Creative Writing Program Manager at the University of Virginia and divides his time between Northern Ireland and Charlottesville, Virginia.