New Year's Poem

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations The Christmas twigs crispen crispen 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 Arcturus Arcturus 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.