'Exact as Any Christmas Tree'

Age has erased some Christmases but so has alcohol. “Erased” isn’t quite right because some of those Christmases were never inscribed in memory in the first place, and will remain forever lacunae in the manuscript. In my experience, alcohol is a corrosive. Besides memory it can dissolve jobs, bank accounts, friendships and marriages. Forty years ago this week, I was reading Robert Penn Warren Selected Poems: 1923-1976. One revealing image sticks: “Gold like a half-slice of orange / Fished from a stiff Old-Fashioned.” My drink was 100-proof vodka, neat, though there was nothing neat about my life. I went to my first meeting three days after Christmas, on the cusp of a new year and a new life. Read Turner Cassity’s “Page from a Bar Guide” (Hurricane Lamp, 1986), a poem Suzanne Doyle describes as “his paean to gin”:

“In glassy ice, erect

And formal and exact

As any Christmas tree,

The juniper, esprit

Inviolate and form

Confined, has prisms. Norm,

Freak, diagram, its spines

Convert the sleet to tines.

“And, blue of ice on blue

Of berry, fast accrue

The cedar flavors, taste

Of freeze. They do not haste,

Our days of Gibsons, roses,

But they come, whose spruce

Is in glass still. November’s

June; the gin remembers.”

I never drank a Gibson in my life, unlike the father in John Cheever’s "Reunion." I was reading that forty years ago too. His Stories was published that year.