Skiers' Courage

 

There are as many kinds of courage on the mountain 

As there are kinds of terrain:

Steep courage, icy courage,

Rough, rocky, tree-plagued, and deep.

 

Life is the same way:

A thousand kinds of courage.

Every hero, perhaps, has a coward in him,

And every coward a hero –

Nascent, waiting to be.

One Way to Write a Poem

 

One way to write a poem

Is to say exactly what you mean 

And then see if it sounds like a poem -

And if it doesn’t, no one ever has to know.

A Reminder from Richard Dawkins

  

Those of us breathing today

Have won the lottery 

Without even paying for a ticket.

Can we complain? Of course we can complain.

But even that is such a privilege

It almost takes the lucky breath away.

Things That Are Easy to Take for Granted (Not a Complete List)

Sunlight, moonlight, the movement of trees;

The snow, the lack of snow, the hope of more;

Cows and pigeons, even cats and dogs;

The absent-minded smile of a girl;

 

All of your favorite foods, and other foods;

Almost any place you’ve been before;

New places, old friends, friendly strangers;

The world, the mind that knows it, life itself.

Sentinels

 

At least four dogs,

Smallish but lion-hearted,

Are barking at us from the riverbank 

As if to say, “You can’t fool us

With brightly-colored boats

And strange equipment;

 

We know intruders when we see them, and

If you persist much longer in this place,

We’ll bark you into oblivion 

And let your masterless boats bob on.”

O, Reason Not the Need!

 

You have no needs, if you think about it.

Survival itself is not a need.

You didn’t need to be born in the first place

(Though there’s no sense being a teenager about it).

 

What you have, of course, are desires,

And some of them seem impossibly strong,

But everything you want most fervently

Is something someone has gone without,

Even if they didn’t survive the experience —

Which, again, isn’t necessary.

 

It’s very liberating, this needlessness.

You’re already in the bonus round.

You’re already wading through the gravy —

The icing on the cake, the superfluous metaphor,

The gilding of the lily; this, it turns out,

Is your life.

Firefly

 

A man makes his way through the darkness

By flicking his lighter over and over,

Like he’s following a rasping firefly

Into a blackness punctuated by light.

 

It’s tempting to call this poem

“A Parable of Faith,”

But it’s only a thing I actually saw

One otherwise-ordinary evening

In this extraordinary world.

Mexico

 

An hour after the party ended

A lone voice was still singing in Spanish,

Weaving between the cabanas like a drunken ghost

Or the echo of a singer long asleep.

 

The morning was full of birdsong

In their universal nonsense language,

But I like to think that Spanish voice is out there still –

 

Blundering into the jungle, felling trees,

Eternally extending the festive night

For the benefit of no one but itself.

Talking to My Mother About Death

 

It was not on my schedule

To talk with my mother about mortality

In the middle of the afternoon,

Over coffee on a gray day.

 

It was not on my to-do list,

Some of which is so overdue

That I should move it to a never-to-do list

And never think of it again.

 

But we both felt like coffee,

And we both like to talk,

And we have mortality in common,

As so many of the best people do;

 

And I can think of worse ways

To pass an hour of a finite life

Than sitting with the one who brought you into it

And gossiping about its end.

Existentialism

  

To the basic circumstances of human life, there are two possible responses: despair, and gratitude.

A Bold Resolution

 

This year I resolve

To do everything the same.

To make the same mistakes,

In the same way, for the same reasons.

To stick with all my flaws,

All my bad habits, thwarted aims,

Unexorcised resentments,

Petty doubts, irrational hates.

 

I resolve to learn nothing,

Not to grow, not to improve,

Never to forgive myself or others,

Never to take stock of what I am.

 

It’s the one thing I haven’t tried:

Keeping things exactly the same.

For a change I’ll change nothing,

And see if the world changes me.

Ritual

 

The wine sparkles,

And so do the people;

We sing a few lines

Of Robert Burns;

 

The old year,

Like an outworn garment,

Falls away;

The new one shimmers

In a haze of drink.

 

We laugh and dance

And toast the future;

We make resolutions

We intend to break;

 

We teeter

Between hope and fear,

Just like we did

Last year.