Liz Ahl
Conjunctions, 2020
We had to drive elsewhere,
out past the snowy screen of pines,
to find enough empty horizon
to have a chance at spotting
Saturn and Jupiter in conjunction—
a meeting both etymology and metaphor
might call conjugal—closer together
than we’d ever seen
or would ever see again, joining
their two lights nearly into one
during the dark year’s deepest darkness.
Before sunset sent us seeking,
two blue jays knocked for several minutes
at the front door with their beaks—
we leaned and listened, unseeing, until
you crept out the basement exit
to see what was tapping, because
we couldn’t from inside and didn’t want
to just open the door in case
whatever waited there was braver
than we were and just came inside,
assuming that a door unlocked
in response to knocking
is an open mouth saying come in.
But they beat it for the tree line as you
approached. A pair of jays, skittish
on one side of the door and us,
a skittish pair on the other, imagining
ridiculous possibilities—rabid
squirrel, miniature Jehovah’s witness.
Of course it was overcast later
when we sought out the shortest day’s
third hidden duo, added that conjunction
to the growing list of things unseen
by our naked eyes in 2020 but still
believed in. We knew they were up there
beyond this cloudy night’s closed door
not because of Christmas or wishing it so,
but because of mathematics
and maybe also because in all that dark
we stared at before driving home
from the edge of the snowy rural airstrip,
we could make out one region of clouds
where a faint smudge betrayed
the lurking, flirting half-moon.
No star or planet strong enough to burn
through that blanket, but the lunar
smudge maybe offered consolation—
even in its blue-black bruising—
the dimmest evidence of light
on the other side.
—Submitted on 12/22/2020
Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017), Home Economics (Seven Kitchens Press, 2016), Talking About the Weather (Seven Kitchens Press, 2012), Luck (Pecan Grove, 2010), and A Thirst That’s Partly Mine winner the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook contest. A new chapbook, Song and Scar, is forthcoming in 2021 from No Chair Press. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Court Green, Crab Orchard Review, Measure, Cutthroat, and other journals. Ahl lives in New Hampshire.
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