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Resolutions of the Reader’s poetry editor
A poem for the New Year
-For Cecilia
A spirited play for words, like a December wind punching your breath
Back down through your esophagus; a resolute sense of commitment
Like the bold disregard maple, chicory, and sumac pay at summer’s end,
Folding in fidelity to the flattening arc of the sun as it carves up the sky
Into dimming quadrants, each a folio text for winter’s constellations
Emerging from the palimsests of autumn’s fallen harliquin kingdom.
(St. Meleagar, pray for us, that the log we place on the fire tapers
With a fit conclusion to light. Merit for us that winsome necessity
Which peaks to ash after embers slump and settle in the cooling grate.)
Some place for the sour dottle of conversation declining into overtures,
Tagged with a dense Horatian incipit: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum…
(At least a foot of it to renew the auld lang syne of relations); an ashtray,
A salver, some shallow receptacle in which to rest the intestate remains
Of thoughts dressed up as desires, become disheveled as desperations;
A primal place to edit stone, revise the grave, compose the breath;
(In some Wisconsin places, where winter sunlight never reaches, frost
Fastens all day to fields of fallen corn—until ashen clouds break like flint
And a sudden sunset ignites the hobbled stalks with crimson wounds.)
The wisdom to know that time is not our creature to tame; fortitude
To justify the margins that will give shape to a moment’s cenotaph;
A full, unvarnished look at the new year’s pink flesh to rectify failures
In squaring the old calendar with our coming days; an even beginning
At stroke of midnight; the odd roundness of cobalt-electric double zeroes
Hugging at the eyes; a hope to clean up life’s messy little exits and ends;
(Lucy offered her eyes on a base plate; we only think to stare in horror:
Her unsightly sockets, each a faceless bezel; we ignore the blood that pushes
Past our own flawed tourbillions; we kindly take from time what little she had.)
A restoraton of makeshift altars to lost things; intoning the sea-shell echo
Of empty niches that await their proper lares and penates; canonization
Of gratitude against complaint; courage to battle the world’s bedeviled flesh
With a mystic’s play on words; early inebriation; noon obsequies; late hours;
The final touch of empty chimes, empty bottles; warm welcome to winter’s
Harsh absolution — a vatic reminder of what yesterday’s sadness sees:
The blue light of evening shimmers behind you, resolute you, in the snow.
Joseph O’Brien is poetry editor for the San Diego Reader.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Resolutions of the Reader’s poetry editor
A poem for the New Year
Resolutions of the Reader’s poetry editor
A poem for the New Year
-For Cecilia
A spirited play for words, like a December wind punching your breath
Back down through your esophagus; a resolute sense of commitment
Like the bold disregard maple, chicory, and sumac pay at summer’s end,
Folding in fidelity to the flattening arc of the sun as it carves up the sky
Into dimming quadrants, each a folio text for winter’s constellations
Emerging from the palimsests of autumn’s fallen harliquin kingdom.
(St. Meleagar, pray for us, that the log we place on the fire tapers
With a fit conclusion to light. Merit for us that winsome necessity
Which peaks to ash after embers slump and settle in the cooling grate.)
Some place for the sour dottle of conversation declining into overtures,
Tagged with a dense Horatian incipit: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum…
(At least a foot of it to renew the auld lang syne of relations); an ashtray,
A salver, some shallow receptacle in which to rest the intestate remains
Of thoughts dressed up as desires, become disheveled as desperations;
A primal place to edit stone, revise the grave, compose the breath;
(In some Wisconsin places, where winter sunlight never reaches, frost
Fastens all day to fields of fallen corn—until ashen clouds break like flint
And a sudden sunset ignites the hobbled stalks with crimson wounds.)
The wisdom to know that time is not our creature to tame; fortitude
To justify the margins that will give shape to a moment’s cenotaph;
A full, unvarnished look at the new year’s pink flesh to rectify failures
In squaring the old calendar with our coming days; an even beginning
At stroke of midnight; the odd roundness of cobalt-electric double zeroes
Hugging at the eyes; a hope to clean up life’s messy little exits and ends;
(Lucy offered her eyes on a base plate; we only think to stare in horror:
Her unsightly sockets, each a faceless bezel; we ignore the blood that pushes
Past our own flawed tourbillions; we kindly take from time what little she had.)
A restoraton of makeshift altars to lost things; intoning the sea-shell echo
Of empty niches that await their proper lares and penates; canonization
Of gratitude against complaint; courage to battle the world’s bedeviled flesh
With a mystic’s play on words; early inebriation; noon obsequies; late hours;
The final touch of empty chimes, empty bottles; warm welcome to winter’s
Harsh absolution — a vatic reminder of what yesterday’s sadness sees:
The blue light of evening shimmers behind you, resolute you, in the snow.
Joseph O’Brien is poetry editor for the San Diego Reader.
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