Daylight Losing Time
Susan McLean

     O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
        —Faustus, quoting Ovid, in Dr. Faustus, Marlowe

 

The horses of the night run slowly, slowly,

on this, the darkest evening of the year,

as we’re advancing toward the time deemed holy,

yet which is most conducive to despair.

 

I deck my halls with strings of small white lights,

but not for Christmas. Here in Minnesota,

the season of gray days and howling nights

holds snow and ice beyond the standard quota,

 

and I, swaddled in wool and down, won’t bring

the lights down till late March, banking my embers

under the ashen clouds till tardy spring

returns the spark my starving heart remembers.

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Published originally in Mezzo Cammin

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Susan’s notes:​​ “When I was teaching in Minnesota for thirty years, I discovered that I had the winter blues, which I later learned is called seasonal affective disorder (SAD). The poem’s Latin epigraph may be translated, ‘Run slowly, slowly, O horses of the night!’ When Ovid wrote it, the speaker wishes the night to be longer because he is with his beloved. But when Christopher Marlowe has his character Faustus say it, it is because at midnight Faustus will be carried off to hell by devils. In the second line of the poem, ‘the darkest evening of the year‘ is a phrase borrowed from Robert Frost‘s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,‘ in which the speaker pauses in the snowy dark woods and seems tempted to remain there, yet reminds himself, ‘But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.‘ Love, death, beauty, despair—at the year‘s turning point, one feels all of life‘s contradictions more intensely.”

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Susan McLean is a retired English professor from Southwest Minnesota State University. She has published two poetry collections, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Latin poems by Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her third poetry book, Daylight Losing Time, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press.

 

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