– lines written on the eve of the New Year, 2018 –
It begins – or it begins again, I should say –
when I begin fishing around my head.
Some time ago I’d accepted that urge to stray,
that need I had felt to revivify the clay
and find another path and pace to tread.
I’d been telling myself, “Go back to the basics!” –
of which, as you know, there are always too many.
I scrambled to clutch them through the matrix
like Beethoven raging over his lost penny
in a score marked forget it superissimo.
(Could be how he discovered his late works,
shunning the wounded vengeance of Lear and Nemo
and sounding out a universe through orphaned quirks
spat up on shores of Crete or Tinian
and saved from an otherwise sure oblivion.)
The basics, as I was saying, are hard to trace,
and for any number of dim reasons:
the lineaments have changed on some ancient face
we faced as our mothers bore us into seasons
(and how they changed is another matter
entirely - was that face cannonballed like the Sphinx?
did we gorge it on something that made it fatter?
or is it just obscured in modern inks?);
the town from which we set out is not on the map,
or if it is it’s all been rebuilt and rezoned
(departing, we’re caught in a rusty trap
we forgot we ever set...thank God someone phoned
so we could read out our rescue coordinates);
or else we’re barred by some dark ordinance
from returning to claim the things we thought we owned.
It’s not at the break of day that we feel this need,
which only strikes us in the afternoon.
Our A.M. is filled with news and the mundane deed,
the scroll of Trump’s analects on our Twitter feed,
our hunt for a new font or background tune -
all that we’ve put into play to keep us going
and make sure we accomplish what we set out to
accomplish to keep Life flowing, knowing
Life could well keep going without me, without you.
In what manner, then, did we think to contribute?
The question that begins our P.M. search
beyond ephemeral fits in the White House perch
and our hope that he’ll say something stupid or cute
to showcase that arch-mediocrity
presiding over our careworn democraty.
But let there be no such lapses on New Years Day!
Let the high spirits with which we begin
remain post meridian, through the sun’s last ray,
suggesting that Day 2 will be a near twin -
a rosy infant cheek on which to pin
resolutions to project us further forward
a span into this current stretch of the project
that destiny appears to have ordered
as our contribution to the human object.
If the object this past year didn’t much improve,
we’ll say that our work is cut out for us.
We’ll enjoin the world to find a healthier groove,
a higher, airier outlook to restore us.
We’ll put to better use each P.M. slump
and learn sublime comeuppance from Putin and Trump!
It does help if we can get going in the morn
in anticipating this falling off,
before our A.M. agenda has gotten torn
from the pole of aspirations we hold aloft,
or graffitied over with spite or scorn
by those who seek, we imagine, to limit us
through censure, envy, misgiving or lack of trust.
Too loud or loose or long? We’ll trim it, thus.
Tomorrow’s tomorrow. For now, the project's bust.
Let it go! We’re what the rest of the day is for!
And shouldn’t life be our own anyway?
If not, it degenerates into keeping score
and reckoning a bill we’re unable to pay.
We’ve far better things to do each minute.
That other game fell apart. We couldn’t win it.
“A life in which the extraordinary took place.”
That’s what we’ll want to be able to claim
someday - “someday” a day that will not be our last
but that will serve as a post to hang our coat on
and a closet to return our shoes to
as we step into homes we’ll have made of ourselves.
A day on which we’ll welcome the ordinary
as a salve to fatigued aspiration
and look forward to routines and conventional
niceties that previously would have kept us
from singling ourselves out with distinction.
Desire will be placed in permanent abeyance.
We’ll lie safe from life’s Macbeth like Banquo’s Fleance,
entirely out of evil’s surveyance,
but honored and respected by those who knew us
when we scaled the peaks of all that was high in us
on mountains of our early momentum.
We’ll look back on our most striking accomplishments,
on our stunning successes and sorry failures
that led to yet more stunning successes.
We’ll even acknowledge those screw-ups that didn’t
resolve into anything much to smile about -
no shiny red ball to kick at the beach
when horizons were nice, being so out of reach,
and we didn’t yet know we’d be measured by them
someday - “someday” a day that wouldn’t come
before the extraordinary had intervened
in the seams of a world that before us had seemed
and only seemed but had no real being
until the horizons unrolled in our seeing.