Ends

A year on fire comes to a smoldering ember, is stomped  out by the collective exhaustion of a people dragged through its flames. We sit waiting, anxiously counting down minutes, knowing nothing really will change at the stroke of midnight but thinking maybe, maybe there’ll be miracles at the end of this clock, at the end of this drink, thinking I am going to make it through this year if it kills me, and hoping it will not. 

79 minutes left. We pour another drink, light a fire in the backyard and watch a full moon cross the heavens, one year I watched the stars in the black sky of the west and said the Universe has already given me the gifts, it is now up to me to use them. And this year the Universe took all our gifts from us, took our hard earned wins and the ground from under us when we’d always taken it for granted but god damn, it did not take our hope, and making it into the new year is how we prove it. 75 minutes left. You will start from the bottom, yes. But you will build towers and light stars, you will give the Universe gifts in return, 67 minutes left and in the new year you hold the Universe just as much as you wanted it to hold you in the travesty of a year that passed. 

It’s a new year. The you is old, but damn, if this isn’t a year it’ll be good. 

Announce

 (I am done
accepting mediocrity
in this life when I am working so
hard
to create miracles, 

am done allowing
complacent,
half-hearted,
attempts at my
attention

when I have whole
hearts
of attention to
share, I 

am no longer taking
applications
on paper napkins
without poetry,
on the backs of
receipts
without sweat stains and
echoing laughter in the
margins do you
hear me?
I am done
with anything less than
your absolute

Fireworks.)

268

I fail, at every turn I fail, not reaching the bars haphazardly splayed above me but tumbling instead into depths below, perpetually convinced that to not reach the top means to be firmly mired at the bottom. Does midwinter always feel so hopeless (the answer is yes)? A dreadful year comes to a close, but you never can outrun yourself. Did you do the things you thought you might make of your life (the answer is never)?

But I see the numbers rise on my list of notes written. See how this year has somehow, despite the muck and mire and the feeling that you are forever so many steps behind, added up to more stories than any other year before it, see how twelve years of keeping this record has been more prolific this year than ever. Sometimes growth does not announce itself in great fanfare. Sometimes it merely arrives, nestles in, after you've walked ten thousand miles one step at a time, after you've built your story brick by brick, sometimes it is just there, and you made it. 

The new year arrives with fireworks and countdowns and much hollering, but that doesn't mean that everything will, nor that if it doesn't, it is somehow less spectacular. 

Keep your eyes open. You may not be falling at all.

Dawn

She comes into the room while it is still dark, 4-year-old bare feet tip-toeing across 150-year-old wood boards and crawling up into the little nook formed by my half-sleeping body. As dawn stretches across the river, we watch the snowflakes start to fall, more and more until they cover the ground and blind the view of the old cemetery. I make a large pot of coffee and take out the sourdough rising in a cold stairwell; how mornings in the country move at different speeds. 

Later, at my desk, staring straight into the appearing sun, I flip through piles of paper to remember the year that past, try to build a new one ahead. Eventually, every memory fades into objects of our illusion, isn't this life so strange? I wanted you to be the one thing I never forgot, but now I can no longer trust my hazy ideas of what you were. I dream such strange dreams here in the country, perhaps it is no different. 

All years end, eventually. 

This, too, shall pass.

Flurry

The morning arrives dark, dragging itself into existence. I sleep a deep sleep and outlast my alarms, this does not happen. The long sleep should make me well-rested, I think as I wade through a day of heavy eyelids: nothing works according to your plans. Little snowflakes dance their way to the ground, they do not stick (what does?). It's only Monday, you tell yourself, always with the mantras, always with the reminder that better things can come if you endure this life. Were we only ever meant to endure it?

I miss a simple joy. 

But it's only winter. 

There is life yet to be lived. 

Isn't there?

Pleasantries

In the late afternoon, midwinter sunshine across barren fields, leaving New York City behind and speeding down the highway, it's a special kind of joy in the freedom of driving out that I haven't quite wrapped my head around yet. The joy lies perhaps most in knowing I can just as easily return. 

I arrived at the creaky little house right as twilight settled across the Hudson, a magic moment and happy faces in the door, a longed for breath of fresh air. Everything is surreal in the side-real, the sun seems to rise at different angles, the clocks move at speeds all their own. We sat at the bar later, a bar, can you believe it? and tried to catch up on things which refuse to be caught. A book of poetry burns a hole in my back pocket, what a dream it is to live in words, what a gift. It gets dark so early here in the country. 

I wonder if one day I'll show you. 

We can set the clocks however we like, I promise.

Rite

(The great magic comes over me. The late-night, grows-in-silence, paints-in-words magic that gave me every purpose, created every guiding light, the impossible magic that delights and astounds me, that tortures me in its absence, returns. I sit silently at the word processor and watch the letters turn into sentences into entire worlds under my fingertips. Sometimes I forget what it is to be moved by the word and think I have been abandoned entirely, that this madness was only youthful conceit at last to be washed away by wisdom and sense, but oh, it is not so. 

if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. 

May we never be so old,
that we cannot hear our own soul
when it speaks to us.)