What Is and Is Not Enough

 

We’ve all heard them say it:

“Seventy years is enough for me.”

As if on some strange morning, not too long from now,

Coffee will suddenly lose its flavor,

Bacon and eggs turn dull and bland,

Sunrise bore us, and the chirping of birds

Go all discordant, like an off-tune harp;

 

As if someday we’ll run out of books

(Though new ones are written every day)

And finish all the little projects

That we’ve been putting off for decades now;

 

As if love itself could somehow sour -

Not one love but all love, overnight;

As if the child we cradle in our arms

Is only waiting to become loathsome -

Which in a way is true, of course,

But also not true, and very much missing the point.

 

The point is this: you have this little moment.

You have no other, and you never will.

Only two lengths of time can ever be sufficient

To sate the boundless hunger of the soul:

 

Eternity, and the infinitesimal present.

Anything in between is not enough.

 

December 23, 2022

A Walk on Christmas Evening

 

Warm light makes the cold colder;

The breath steams, and the beating heart

Keeps the fire burning in the blood –

Keeps my little human flame alive.

 

Other fires burn in houses,

Flickering on the happy cheeks

Of wine-flushed, gift-besotted people

Raising again the grateful cup.

 

A shadow steals by lighted windows,

Turning to face them, turning away,

Back to the gathering, snow-stung dark,

And his own hearth, not too far ahead.

Vladimir’s Pebble

 

The secret that Nabokov said he knew

Is that a pebble gleaming like a jewel in surf

Is really the jewel, and never was the pebble,

No matter what your grasping fingers tell you.

 

A string of lights you wind around a pole

Is not a string of lights around a pole

But rather an enchantment, faerie-made,

That makes a mockery of the mundane world –

 

The worldly world, which naïvely dreams 

That nothing is as wonderful as it seems.

On the Shame of Having a Body

 

One is tempted to be humiliated

By the wearing-out of flesh:

The falling hair, the weathering skin, the sag,

And other, nameless, cruelties of time –

 

As if there were great shame in being mortal –

A temporal being in a changing world –

A bubble in the flow of entropy

That slides the universe from dawn to dust.

 

But why should this be so? The same brute fact

That gives us birth and youth brings age and death;

And surely here the only shame is God’s

If all of this was His divine idea.

 

The rest of us wear the marks of travel, true,

And look like we live hard because we do.

The Good Kind of Day

 

It was a big small day.

The things that happened almost didn’t.

The things that didn’t happen were, as usual,

Far more seductive than the things that did.

 

But it was a good day.

A few people noticed.

A few people spoke,

And some of them were moved.

The earth did not shake, or swallow up the damned,

But there was a thoughtful nodding of certain heads,

And someone, somewhere, shed a year or two 

Without the inconvenience of being sad.

Nativity

 

Christmas is for children.

For them tinsel is trailing gold,

And every gift is everything wondrous -

At least until you open it.

 

A sound in the night is reindeer coming;

A bell in the wind is a racing sleigh;

And Jesus is probably Santa Claus,

Or at least knows him very well.

 

Snow is like ice cream, like a cotton beard;

Holly and ivy look good to eat;

Music is music, wrapping you tight

Like Mother and cocoa and blankets at night.

 

Carols are drifting in midnight’s air;

The year-wished morning is on its way.

Christmas will always be for children,

And we’re all children today.

Talking About the Weather

 

People say it’s boring

To talk about the weather –

The way the crystals of the early snow

Are gilded by the welcome light of dawn

Before it melts them like a metaphor;

 

Or how the warming of the April ground

Unlocks a fragrance that the winter hid:

A smell of lush decay, in which the breath

Of all the forest is exhaled at last;

 

All this is boring.

Let’s not speak of it.

Let’s talk of politicians, rising stocks,

The fashionable new way to wear a scarf,

And every minor health complaint there is.

 

Meanwhile, somewhere, quite unseen by us,

A boring cloud making its boring way

Across dull heaven is transfixed with light –

With sharply-boring radiance, and on the ground

A deer looks up into the golden ray –

Not bored, not talking, but awash in grace.

Light Between Light

 

In the time they call the gloaming

Between dark and dawn or dusk,

When the birds are all a-homing

And the sky’s an empty husk,

 

There is not a single shadow

Anywhere under the sky

And the light aficionado –

Such a connoisseur as I –

 

Can only stand in wonder

At the warm and sourceless glow

That the world is living under

As the starlight creeps in slow.