the most time of the year

The broken and ploughed stalks blow listlessly
utterly stuck, unneeded, unknown
under endless meaningless grey;
The crows that shriek their oaths
outside of time, unanswered
by December's silent roiling bristles;
The distant highway's empty endeavor;
A thought diminished, broken in mid-life,
gone underground, a seed for another season.

To the fixed hissing song of the radiator
and its redeeming, knocking-far-away heart,
we draw faces on the windows
in the afternoon's cranky half-light.
The sun is young and already waning,
the bed is warm and us-enveloping,
the day so crisp and blank as if anything
could happen – anything!
Even nothing.

The last tinsel-strewn trees dot the roadside,
a canopy of wishes now supine,
while in the air, accounts are settled
or unsettled, trimmed and redressed,
and the choirs are returned to their homes.
A gesture of glittering sleet tickles the night's curtain,
and she laughs, with a dry heavy howl that
hollows out the valley,
ripples on the static lake,
tears into the skin, the bones, the walls, the pillow.

A taxi sweeps the dusty pavement,
barely breathing its brittle trail.
Two streaky red eyes trace the mottled
building faces,
holding hardly a memory of before and
the barest hint of the next.
What left to open but these boxes of light?
These lives of four corners, four seasons,
for doing, foregoing,
forgiving, forever.

Profiles in Letting Go

You sit there, in a rare moment of sitting there, looking out the windows and watching the sun dodge behind drifting clouds. You sit there, watching, wondering how it is all going to turn out. Maybe it will never turn out. Perhaps it already has. What is this phrase – "turn out?"

You stand at the top of a long hill and instead of walking down it (and certainly instead of rolling), you walk further along its ridge. From here you can see the town, and the town behind the town, and the steeples of towns that aren't even any of those towns. From this land's shoulder, stray beams of sunlight illuminate patches of somewhere, nowhere. All of this, and you are the figure on the ridge, someone else's epiphany.

In Japan, December is the bounenkai season, or the "Forget-The-Year-Party." Alcohol is an excellent amnesiatic agent, so you see many drunk people on the street on Japanese December nights. Me, I prefer the classic flowerpot-
dropped-on-the-head method of forgetting, but this is not always practical, especially in a Northern climate.

Then there is the King who was crowned Master of All He Sees. Turns out it was a curse as well, because every time he blinked, chaos took a step closer. He tried not to blink, but his eyes dried out and soon he had more than made up for the not blinking. In time of course, he grew tired in his vigilance and fell deeply asleep, where he became master of nothing. Well, perhaps of his dreams, we don't know, he's not a king anymore.

You soar across this bountiful land. You soar across oxbow lakes and skewbald fields, past the ring road and the warehouses, over the neighbors and their fences, joined together on this land. You soar as an angel, ministering shared concern and individual outcome, a siren without a name. You braid these concerns into a heavenly rope. You soar ever higher, past the airplanes and the oxygen, past the questions and the answers, past the moment into no moment, into a peace that is all that peace is. Yet, from the ground you can see that far. You soar.

peace to you
from all of us

Happy Hanukkah

from NBC Tower. December 5, 2007

Wang From The Holidays

"The Little Drummers Boy"
The newest Oswald Wang deproduction.
Josh Groban v. John Bonham and a side of Shitmat.
Not recommended for newborns.