Thinking, as I suppose many do around this time, about change and rebirth.
And was listening earlier to Leonard Cohen's lovely "Joan of Arc," specifically this line, when the warrior-saint is on the pyre: "Myself, you know I long for love and light/But must it come so cruel, and must it be so very bright?"
(Also, is it just me or is Cohen the missing lovechild link between Leonard Nimoy and Peter Coyote?)
Happy New Year to all.
Poem for the New Year
Forget the cults, the eschatology of horsemen:
the panting, the boils, the locusts. It’s usually less dramatic:
a quiet moment in the driveway when something
shifts in your chest; the late night unexpected call.
Always small worlds are coming to their conclusions:
screws surrender to rust, bread to the mold’s greed,
nestlings to the dizzying lures of earth. Every day
brings a case of misjudged medians, the traffic
choked to one lane, flares marking the steel mangle
you’re meant to look away from but can’t, with your
love for the swerve, for the smash, for the black screen
and the sound of fluttering celluloid. For Big Bangs,
little deaths, shipwrecks, shootings, bridge collapses;
for singing fat ladies, copper-mine canaries that drop
and draw the TV trucks, inspire the harrowing rescue.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell a house fire from a block party;
we’d break out the beers if the wives wouldn’t scold.
Even the great sequoias arrive on the wings of endings:
flames swallow cones, force them fertile, reduce
smothering scrub to embers so that seedlings—
trees that will grow to tickle the stomach of the sky—
can find a foothold in the rich ash
of what once occupied the world.
So cock the safety. Shred the diary.
Cry the long, self-pitying-jackass cry. Throw the drink
in his face and walk out grinning, and gun the engine
when you peel away. Or if these are too much
for the simple chime of midnight, at least admit
you sometimes consider the possibilities of what
comes next: the cold smell of ocean, the gulls,
the unfamiliar markets with their strange, knobbly fruits,
the wind moving through you as though it understands
the scores of lives you must lead with this one body.
And was listening earlier to Leonard Cohen's lovely "Joan of Arc," specifically this line, when the warrior-saint is on the pyre: "Myself, you know I long for love and light/But must it come so cruel, and must it be so very bright?"
(Also, is it just me or is Cohen the missing lovechild link between Leonard Nimoy and Peter Coyote?)
Happy New Year to all.
Poem for the New Year
Forget the cults, the eschatology of horsemen:
the panting, the boils, the locusts. It’s usually less dramatic:
a quiet moment in the driveway when something
shifts in your chest; the late night unexpected call.
Always small worlds are coming to their conclusions:
screws surrender to rust, bread to the mold’s greed,
nestlings to the dizzying lures of earth. Every day
brings a case of misjudged medians, the traffic
choked to one lane, flares marking the steel mangle
you’re meant to look away from but can’t, with your
love for the swerve, for the smash, for the black screen
and the sound of fluttering celluloid. For Big Bangs,
little deaths, shipwrecks, shootings, bridge collapses;
for singing fat ladies, copper-mine canaries that drop
and draw the TV trucks, inspire the harrowing rescue.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell a house fire from a block party;
we’d break out the beers if the wives wouldn’t scold.
Even the great sequoias arrive on the wings of endings:
flames swallow cones, force them fertile, reduce
smothering scrub to embers so that seedlings—
trees that will grow to tickle the stomach of the sky—
can find a foothold in the rich ash
of what once occupied the world.
So cock the safety. Shred the diary.
Cry the long, self-pitying-jackass cry. Throw the drink
in his face and walk out grinning, and gun the engine
when you peel away. Or if these are too much
for the simple chime of midnight, at least admit
you sometimes consider the possibilities of what
comes next: the cold smell of ocean, the gulls,
the unfamiliar markets with their strange, knobbly fruits,
the wind moving through you as though it understands
the scores of lives you must lead with this one body.
2 comments:
wow, what a great new year's wish! reminds me of coleridge in the best sense. ... can't tell house fire from a block party, among the many wonderful lines
... mouse
thanks, mousekins :) of course no one will want to publish it until next year, if then!
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