NEW YEAR'S EVE, 2011

Roaming around the yard with my camera, I couldn't let 2011 go and had to photograph the sunset on New Year's Eve last year. The trees stood fast, casting their sarabande of naked limbs against the sky.

 I love how the sun hangs on, throwing all its passionate self into its leavetaking, especially on a day like this, pulling dust, clouds, all shades of the spectrum into its farewell.  The brush and limbs weave a tapestry, an embroidery needing no human handiwork.

The dogs at the door way wonder what the heck I'm doing wandering around in the near dark.  Have I found a cache of bones, a buried secret, an intruder to chase?   Why won't I come back in and scratch their bellies?

I think, too, of the friends we've lost over the past year, caught up now in whatever lies within this glorious light of leavetaking.  Patrick Morris, J.P. Holmes, my dear friend Elizabeth's son, too young to be taken away, Harriette's husband Don, Jean Pittillo,  Richard's Peggy, so many....
        
"Walk in the world for us, " they ask.  And so in this New Year, we set forth.

KITCHEN MEDITATIONS #1: Happiness

(My kitchen window, New Year's Eve)

December 31, 2009, 10:36 am

So when redroom.com asks me to blog about happiness, I don't know what to say.

I don't know what "happiness" means. How to answer, if you are a poet?

Maybe you say, that day in November when I was sixteen and I ran through the fields and the sky gathered me up....

Ok, you're thinking cliche. I get it. So, let me try again.

I open a book in the college library and there I find a poem by James Dickey that pulls me in like a lasso. Friday night on campus, everyone else on dates, getting drunk at frat houses. I am what you might call happy to sit in silence, nobody else in the stacks, reading this poet named James Dickey.

But-- Oh, no, James Dickey is not politically correct. Sorry. He was a boozer, treated his women badly, his own gift shabbily.

So, instead I open another book and Federico Garcia Lorca pulls me into "verde, que te quiero verde," and I follow it all the way to the end and later declare my major in Spanish, only to change it to art because I have fallen in love with Kandinsky, only to change it to English because I have fallen in love with Beowulf, Wordsworth, Hopkins.

Let me tell you about the time I walked with a man in October, all the leaves burning, and thought I had entered a sacred wood......but that ended in marriage, and we all know, if we watch enough t.v. or read enough contemporary fiction, that marriage does not lead after nearly 40 years to real "happiness." Whatever happiness is.

So, I stand in my kitchen, this New Year's Eve and watch the trees, naked as I want my words to be right now, waiting for a a little light, a little green. And I wonder, am I happy? The sky is gray, the way I like it this time of year. There's soup on the stove, bread in the oven. I don't know if this makes me happy. But here in this cluttered kitchen, the girl running through the field, the young woman falling in love, the old dead grandmother smiling down at me from the photo over the counter come together in the scent of bread rising, soup simmering. They do not ask if I am happy. They ask if I am still alive.

BLUE MOON

New Year's Eve, and we aren't celebrating. I'm already garbed for bed. But outside the moon is rising, the "blue moon," and of course I have to go out in my bedclothes to see it, along with my digital camera, although I'm no good as yet in taking night photos.

Fog everywhere. Inside it, the lineaments of the trees beside our house fascinate me. I wish I could paint them. Instead I snap a not very good photo.

Then I find her, Mistress Blue Moon, hiding behind a tall pine.

Blue Moon

Why so blue,

the fog swirled

around you

atop the tree?

I try to snare

you with shutter

clicks, New Year’s

Eve having gone

to my head,

bubbles bursting

around me

as I roam

the backyard

in muddy scuffs

and gray nubby

bathrobe (on which

my dog sleeps

every night).

Why so blue,

I ask myself

looking up at you,

oh you moon

turning fog

into gauze into

silk into spider’s

web (choose

one) I'm trolling

through

as if I don't

want to go back

inside to the light

of a room

where I know

every shadow that

waits for me.

The fog as captured by my camera looked like bubbles! Champagne bubbles?

Inside, real champagne waited in the fridge. We would save it for New Year's Day when we felt more celebratory. Tonight I longed only to fall asleep, knowing the fog swaddled everything outside, erasing the rough edges. Easing us into another year, like a veil drifting before our eyes, one that would be gone when morning came.