Fireworks, Salt Lake City, New Year’s Eve 2017

They set them off early, first a few individuals
Scattered around residential neighborhoods,
And then a proper display just before ten.
Or they set them off late, as by early afternoon
Online, one could read the reports and see
The clips and pics of completed celebrations
In Polynesia, Hong Kong, Auckland, Sydney.
Who knew what time it really was anywhere?
We didn’t do fireworks for New Year’s Eve
In the neighborhood where I grew up,
And my evangelical family preferred
Watch Night services at our cinderblock church
To New Year’s Rocking Eve on TV. The first
Time I recall firecrackers going off at midnight
Was at the end of 1987, when I was in Hoboken
With a sometime lover and some friends.
It was snowing and people on the street
Were popping off small fireworks randomly.
I drove away down a dark white interstate
And was, as they say, lucky to get home alive.
In 1999 in Chicago, my girlfriend and I spent
The afternoon in bed watching the millennium
Crawl across the globe and when our turn
Came, we stood at the window of our hotel room
Wrapped in a blanket to watch the anticlimax
Of a second-rate display over Lake Michigan.
(Chicago had parceled its fireworks displays
And distributed them around town, fearing
Too large a gathering and the Millenium Bug.)
Las Vegas, New Orleans, Chicago again,
But I didn’t see fireworks for the holiday again
Until I moved to Salt Lake City, in the aughts,
When I would sometimes watch them
From my downtown condo balcony
While my New-Year’s-Eve despising wife slept.
In ‘08, with a new fiancée in Takaka, New Zealand
I watched a pitiful few squibs over a warm bay.
After that, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago
That a new year came in again with a display.
I took my daughter to our small town celebration
Outside Zion, which was set off early enough
For a five year-old. And last year, as a family,
We watched the same charming local show
From our backyard. It was good enough, although
I knew when it started that this year would be
Impossible for us. And then here I was,
An honest revenant at the end, not much,
But still breathing some weeks after freezing,
Back in Salt Lake as a guest, while daughter slept
Next to a glow-in-the-dark flower we’d sculpted
And the complete Harry Potter volumes.
Our hosts-in-law had gone upstairs to bed.
The fireworks were heard from our perspective
As distant, sprinkled gunfire, invisible from here,
And I watched the Times Square ball drop
That I’d only seen in person once, in 1989,
The night my grandfather died in his bed,
And who knew what time really was anywhere?