10 Days In ...
Jan 11 2017


10 days into the new year.
Far enough
for lower case.

Over a week 
since the festive Eve
and its morning-after namesake
New Year’s Day.
Awakening late
to softening balloons,  boozy bilious blear,
lipstick-rimmed flutes
whose toast has lost their fizz.
As dull a day
as tinseled trees
shedding needles by the curb.

As if a midnight kiss, a quick embrace
and then it’s all downhill
for the next few hundred days.
Because how long
until it’s awkward shaking hands
with a Happy New Year?
Until resolutions fade, Christmas bills appear?

But then it dawns
under clear blue skies
on a world concealed in white,
softened 
by the democracy of snow.

A world 
whose beauty recurs, year after year
in the cycling of seasons
as old as the earth.

A world
reassuring in its sameness,
where arbitrary dates
pass majestically unnoticed.

Because nature is indifferent
to the conceit of human progress,
our illusion of a future
just out of reach.

An occasional day
in lower case
in winter’s vast middle.



I don’t see this poem  so much as a celebration of winter as I do a perspective on nature. This is a trope I return to so frequently it’s becomes tiresome, and strikes me as intellectually lazy. Which may be one of the reasons I was lukewarm about this piece. Anyway, as I read it, the poem is  mostly about humility: about man’s conceit that he occupies the centre of the universe, contrasted with our true insignificance; about nature’s imperious (in the poem I use “majestic”  ;-)) indifference. Which perfectly suits my general philosophy of nihilism and atheism:  that we inhabit a cold indifferent universe; that our presence here is accident and epiphenomenon; and that we are meaningless marginal actors who will not be missed.  Here, the human conceit is the arbitrariness of the  calendar, and this is never more clear than the new year:  a capitalized day in the vast middle of winter. 

That’s my favourite line. I like the way the geographic connotation of “vast middle” calls back to the landscape of unbroken snow. I like that the best line is the last. I like that I was able to resist my usual tendency to tie up the ending with a cutesy little rhyming couplet -- a stylistic tic I often can’t resist.  (I like “democracy of snow” as well. But I’m loathe to highlight is, since I plagiarized this from myself. I know I’ve used it once before; maybe twice. Technically, of course, you can’t plagiarize yourself! But you can go to the well too often, becoming lazy and predictable and uncreative.)

The “future” is an invention that came very late in recorded human history. It’s the hallmark of this notion of “modernity”. Because life, from birth to death, hardly changed for our subsistence ancestors; there was no expectation of progress or newness. They didn’t view history as an upward sloping curve; they viewed history as unchanging and cyclic, circling back on itself just as the cycle of life and the cycle of seasons. So they had no trouble imagining themselves co-existing with their dead ancestors. They didn’t die afraid of “missing out”, nor end life feeling useless. They lived in the moment so much better than us. They didn’t think old people were dispensable and hopelessly square, unfashionable, and behind the times; rather, old people were repositories of essential knowledge and suitably revered. 

This is what I was getting at when I wrote “illusions of a future” and “conceit of human progress”. It’s all hubris. Nature is eternal, and goes on with this almost contemptuous indifference toward our pompous self-importance. Which is why I like stepping out of the breathless breakneck “now” and slowing down. 

Everything old is new again. There is nothing new under the sun. The important things in life are eternal. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Tired cliches; but with a core of truth. A lot of what preoccupies us -- in news, social media, technology -- is all just noise. 

I’m pleased with  “occasional ​day”, because the meaning cuts both ways. Occasional, in everyday usage, has a quality of randomness. But it also contains “occasion”, which is something special and singular. In poetry, there is something called “Occasional Poetry”, which may sound like it’s just something you do once in awhile when the mood strikes, but actually means poetry that’s written to mark a formal public occasion:  the  crowning of a king, the signing of an armistice. It’s what a poet laureate is supposed to do. So the word has this upper case and lower case thing going on simultaneously. And here, in the poem, it seems to say that even an undifferentiated random day is as beautiful as the designated celebration. 

This is a good example of  every word in poetry carrying so much more weight than prose! I love how you can invest so much power in a single word. Sitting down to write is like taking your place at this great buffet of language that English provides, and having the pure joy of picking over this cornucopia of choice for whatever it is that delights you, that perfectly captures your thought and feeling. When you struggle and then nail it, when you can compress something complex or ineffable into a single word or phrase, and then when the sound and cadence fit, it feels almost orgasmic! ...OK, that’s obviously a bit of an exaggeration. Still, it’s addictive. You want that same feeling again. Another hit.