This Time
a poem for every new year
What can there possibly be to say?
Just because numbers roll over on a clock
and the calendar trips itself
into rebirth?
It’s hope, we say,
that everything we said and did
a year ago at this time
will somehow
fall out differently,
though given that the sky
is the same
and the breath on our necks
in the quietest moments
when the eyes and the jaw and the mind
are perfectly still,
in that moment before wakefulness,
it still whispers with the softest
caress of reassurance.
It says:
you have no idea do you
and not necessarily as a question,
but as an instruction.
It is comforting to know
that as the numbers get higher,
they become mere figures,
vague and yet familiar,
and so go our aspirations,
and wisdom arrives,
finally, as reassuring defeat,
because we’ve waited this long
to know it, and goddam,
you would think we’ve earned it
this time.
— New Orleans, 2 Jan 2021
