December 9, 2025
Tuesday
From my journal this morning:
7:50 am/13° — yikes!! nope — 12° now. The temp dropped between the time I laid my phone on the table and came back to start this day.
30 minutes I’ve been sitting here, my hands wrapped around the Wernersville mug with the drawing of the Holy Spirit on it. First Cup is almost gone. The flavor is flat, and it is nearly stone cold. I just want to go back to bed.
There ensued then more whining, more expressions of my low mood, my persistent pain from spinal stenosis. (It goes away, mostly, when I sit down, but getting from one place to another can be an ordeal. Going down steps is almost easy. Ascending is an ordeal.) I labeled myself depressed, not just the winter complication known as SAD, nor the blunted affect of someone coping with a significant loss. but an expression of dysthymia, a condition I have had all my life but not officially diagnosed until my mid-forties.
I brooded for a while on my current obsessions: Did I do the right things for Ron in his final days? Did I make it easier or harder for him to enter the next astral plane of his existence? I drew my Second Cup, and decided to at least look for #todayspoem and then go back to bed. It was not yet 9:00.
As I had done yesterday, I opened The Best American Poetry 2025 in my Kindle library. Except this time I didn’t use the large screen on my tablet reader (it just seemed too overwhelming a task to get up, move the device to the table, and plug it in). I opened it on my phone.
Kindle delivers BAP25 to me in white letters on a black background. That’s probably something I could change, but . . . Anyway, I scrolled through the now quite very small pages (forgetting mostly that Kindle scrolls side-to-side, not up-and-down), and settled on a poem called “Aubade.” (An aubade is a morning song about lovers separating at dawn. It has also been defined as a song or instrumental composition concerning, accompanying, or evoking daybreak.) “You don’t have to know how to live./ It keeps happening either way,” I read. The poem describes a morning walk, in which the speaker decides to take a route different from their habitual one. I really liked the last two lines: “I thought the streetlamps were the moon repeatedly./ I walked on in light of my mistakes.”
I read the author’s comment included many pages/swipes beyond where the text was. Liked that, too. Then I endeavored to find a copy of the poem I could link to, for purposes of a piece like this. I searched for “Heather Christie.” I searched for ten minutes or so, coming up on dead ends. Although Heather Christie was associated with some poetry, nothing with “Aubade” or The Southern Review (the original place of publication) appeared. In fact, the material I did come across seemed incongruent with the poem I had just read.
Then, through a process I could not repeat (known as the Dumb Luck method of discovery), I came to understand that the poet I sought was Heather Christle. Do you see the difference? Heather Christie is a writer of young adult literature and a very popular podcast/book/off-Broadway show called LoveNotes. Heather Christle, on the other hand, is a more traditional poet and memoirist who teaches at Emory University. She has had occasion to make the difference between the two Heathers clear.
And suddenly, the idea that I had spent a good chunk of time looking for the wrong poet because I misread the itty-bitty letters through probably the wrong spot on my progressive lenses just snapped me out of the morass I’d been wallowing in, and I laughed. Was it the coffee finally kicking in? Did the Holy Spirit depicted on my mug roll his eyes and give me a metaphorical kick in the head? I don’t know. I don’t care. The day took a turn, and I was grateful.
See you tomorrow!
(As I noted, the poem is hard to find. Try this link to a reader’s blog post that gives the text of the poem in two images.)