New Year's Eve Day

I've been struggling to write and revise poems for days, and falling back to procrastination and listening to podcasts about "Breaking Bad"  and  going to the kitchen and baking ( more productive than the podcasts).

And then today my Facebook/Poet friend April Lindner posted this poem by Richard Wilbur:

Year's End by Richard Wilbur

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.


- Richard Wilbur


What can I write after that?


I'm listening to a tape I recorded off the radio some years ago on New Year's Eve day, from the wonderful radio show "Songs for Aging Children."  Here's one from Neil Young:

Old man look at my life
I'm a lot like you were
Old man look at my life
I'm a lot like you were

Old man look at my life
Twenty four and there's so much more
Live alone in a paradise
That makes me think of two

Love lost, such a cost
Give me things that don't get lost
Like a coin that won't get tossed
Rolling home to you

Old man take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
The whole day through

Ah, one look in my eyes
And you can tell that's true

Lullabies, look in your eyes
Run around the same old town
Doesn't mean that much to me
To mean that much to you

I've been first and last
Look at how the time goes past
But I'm all alone at last
Rolling home to you

Old man take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
The whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
And you can tell that's true

Old man look at my life
I'm a lot like you were
Old man look at my life
I'm a lot like you were

and this one from Paul Simon:


Old friends, old friends,
Sat on their park bench like bookends
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
of the high shoes of the old friends

Old friends, winter companions, the old men
Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sun
The sounds of the city sifting through trees
Settles like dust on the shoulders of the old friends.

Can you imagine us years from today,
Sharing a park bench quietly
How terribly strange to be seventy

Old friends, memory brushes the same years,
Silently sharing the same fears

Time it was and what a time it was,
A time of innocence, a time of confidences,
Long ago it must be,
I have a photograph,
Preserve your memories,
They’re all that’s left you...