The candles are fake burning in the new old windows of my movie set house
Like I have died and been reincarnated as Kevin Mcallister.
Still, I chose to pick a fight while decorating the streetside for Christmas,
Just as I chose red bows for the fence posts.
O’Hara was 36 when she played Kevin’s mom,
Which the internet can’t seem to believe,
Too young I guess, to be so frantic.
But I am nearly 36,
And this stage of life feels like dawning
Regret in the middle seat of an airplane,
A desperate need to turn back
Having just reached cruising altitude.
In that part of the universe where she is not Catherine O’Hara but
Kate Mcallister, I wonder if she argues with her husband about how to hang the pine swags–
I wonder if she knows, like I do now, that a swag is the oblong cousin of the wreath.
This is among the things you learn in the suburbs:
The grey-white light just after a first snow casts everything in Ansel Adams black and white
Even in the middle of the damn day.
Watching the water freeze on the reservoir
Feels like vertigo, or three glasses of wine, but
Dancing on a forest trail alone, knowing yours is the only car in the parking lot, works better than wine for a jolt of happiness.
With my eyes closed the seabirds sound the same down the road from my new old house as they do on the Coney Island boardwalk
Where earlier this year I showed my daughter a seahorse for the first time at the aquarium.
Three generations huddled close to its glass exhibit.
Just a month ago she turned two years old, still remembering—
Seahorse mama, she says intermittently, sticky with syrup off the pancakes she screamed for.
Seahorse mama.
Like a touchstone to the version of me who ran through the surf in a pair of sequined pants
And the one who can feel the pride of my ancestors
When she says, “Jojo is from Brooklyn,” in plain English to a woman at the grocery store.
This poem, like everything—
The house and the seahorse and the gulls crying out to each other that winter has come—
Have become about her,
And that’s how I know that I’m not Kevin.
I’m Kate after she returns home.
Imagining her child in every space before filling it,
Frantically searching for forgiveness,
Eating the dry cold from the air in the driveway while
Carving the snow from the windshield with a stick in lieu of a scraper.
Smiling at the neighbors in a way that says,
I regret letting anyone ever think they know me.