New Year's Poem

N
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations
The Christmas twigs crispencrispen To make crisp and needles rattle
Along the window-ledge.
A solitary pearl
Shed from the necklace spilled at last week’s party
Lies in the suety,suety Fatty; from suet, an animal fat used in cooking to create tallow snow-luminous plainness
Of morning, on the window-ledge beside them.
And all the furniture that circled stately
And hospitable when these rooms were brimmed
With perfumes, furs, and black-and-silver
Crisscross of seasonal conversation, lapses
Into its previous largeness.
I remember
Anne’s rose-sweet gravity, and the stiff grave
Where cold so little can contain;
I mark the queer delightful skull and crossbones
Starlings and sparrows left, taking the crust,
And the long loop of winter wind
Smoothing its arc from dark ArcturusArcturus The brightest star in the northern sky, located in the constellation Boötes down
To the bricked corner of the drifted courtyard,
And the still window-ledge.
Gentle and just pleasure
It is, being human, to have won from space
This unchill,unchill Warmed, thawed habitable interior
Which mirrors quietly the light
Of the snow, and the new year.
48
Rating:

Comment form:

*Max text - 500. Manual moderation.

Similar Poems:

Now and Then by James Schuyler
James Schuyler
for Kenward Elmslie
Up from the valley
Read Poem
0
61
Rating:

Autobiography: New York by Charles Reznikoff
Charles Reznikoff
I

It is not to be bought for a penny
in the candy store, nor picked
from the bushes in the park. It may be found, perhaps,
in the ashes on the distant lots,
among the rusting cans and Jimpson weeds.
If you wish to eat fish freely,
cucumbers and melons,
Read Poem
0
80
Rating:

The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations
Read Poem
0
59
Rating:

Hymn to Life by James Schuyler
James Schuyler
The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp
And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass
Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away
The sand. The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.”
The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence
And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made:
There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but
Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be
Read Poem
0
97
Rating:

The Deathwatch Beetle by Linda Pastan
Linda Pastan
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations
Read Poem
0
56
Rating:

I Grant You Ample Leave by George Eliot
George Eliot
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations
Read Poem
0
54
Rating:

It was not Death, for I stood up, (355) by Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations
Read Poem
0
59
Rating:

A Tale by Louise Bogan
Louise Bogan
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations
Read Poem
0
60
Rating:

Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
Robert Hayden
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations
Read Poem
0
60
Rating: