David Lee's Poem About the Day After the 2016 Election

Aubade
a love poem
9 November 2016

Jan transfixed in dawnflay after the longest night of her life in the swollen eyed kitchen, lost between thought and next somewhere spanning mesmerization and death meditation. Beyond the window a figure, hunched into the cold and shuffling, made its way uphill toward our dome on the rock. Somebody’s coming, and Jax barked, and Jan said What? Look and she looked through the barest orange wisp of an insipid harbinger of sunrise and said Hush Jax, it’s Carol and she went to the door and out and our birdfeeding neighbor with the yard of glorious flowers of all colors, now gone with the season, opened her black coat in the gravel driveway to a bottle of white wine and both women stood bleary and looked at each other and then fell into embrace with Jax just aside looking up at them in wonderment beneath a daylight almost translucent half moon above the sleeping woman horizon, lost and frail in the empty Sierra sky as the ghost of an almost forgotten terror, they clutched one another and wept and wept.

-David Lee

David Lee's Aubade, A Love Poem, 9 November 2016 was conceived while he and his wife Jan were living at McCormick House in Silver City, Nevada in 2016. Utah's first and longest serving Poet Laureate and a Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet, Lee has been back to McCormick House in 2017 and 2018 as well and plans to publish a book next year full of poems inspired by Silver City. To hear him read Aubade, A Love Poem, 9 November 2016 and to hear more about how he came to write the poem, follow this link to his February 2018 interview with community radio station KNVC:

https://www.knvc.org/featured/poet-david-lee-reads-unpublished-work-from-his-new-collection-mine-tailings/