52 Sonnets—One Sonnet a Week, for a Year—That Year: 2010

Contents

01: New Year Snow	02: Blizzard Wind
03: Two Brides	04 Mid-Winter Thaw
05 Lake Effect Snow Bands	06 Skeleton Heart
07 Snowshoe Spring	08 Crows at Dawn
09 Eye Contact in a Mirror	10 Spice Winds
11 Silver Tree	12 The Healing Words Can Bring
13 Spring, the Spendthrift	14 Between the Earth and Sky
15  Reluctantly Rising	16 Courage
17 The Cardinal	18 The Bottle Left Behind
19 Maypole Memories	20 Honeysuckle Breezes
21 Aubade	22 Mephistopheles Performs
23 The Restlessness of Longest Days	24 The Seeds of Memory
25 Storm at Solstice	26 Midpoints
27 Man Unfated	28 Liquid Light
29 Pithy Rain	30 Humid Rest
31 Sun on the trunk of a familiar pine	32 Adirondack Evening Pines
33 Bacchanalia of Corn	34 Monstrous Summer
35 Impressions of Tivoli Gardens	36 Dawn and Golden Rod
37 Contrails 9-11	38 Autumn's Progress
39 Bonny Step	40 Autumn Toils
41 Bohemian to Proletarian	42 The Ethic of Profit
43 All Souls' Eve	44 All Souls' Day
45 In November	46 Holiday Season
47 Winter Falls	48 Approaching winter storm at sunset
49 An Invocation	50 Eclipse of the Red Solstice Moon
51 The Final Christmas Candle	52 Year's End

01: New Year Snow   Countless crystal mirrors each reflected Each mirror to each mirror each is facing. Self-alluding, Time is self erasing Each moment in each moment self-deflected In infinite regression, Time portending Time's demise, predated; A bloated oroboros, never sated, All history begins with future's ending. Narcisistic possibility Self-perpetuates oblivion. Multiplying acts unacted on Infinity lacks linearity The vagaries of endlessness redressed, Our freedoms are by boundaries expressed.

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02: Blizzard Wind   Raptor-taloned, sharp-beaked blizzard sweeping Beating arctic wings in rapt frustration Rages as the icy turf is sleeping Perma frozen in its hibernation   "Wake! Wake!" The white is furious at slumber Frost-heavy sibilation its reply "We are the horde, uncountable in number! We are the action sloth cannot deny!"   Still answerless is stillness, unrelenting As restlessness is passionately venting   The peaceful ground ignores the plaintive screeching Wind rampaging, flapping, overreaching   There is a calm in earth that can remind us Impatience only leaves ourselves behind us.

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03: Two Brides   Ivory is ivory reflected In statuettes of snowy gemini White fire to white fire is directed Each star the star that each is lighted by   Which is the one, this is the other one Love is love; a false duality Is blended and division is undone Symmetry dissolves in unity   Fire is fusion, ice is an illusion Of boundaries in false solidity Love unfrozen flows to love unfrozen Each river is enveloped by each sea   Rejoice in flowing water's liberation Imbibe the joy in giddy celebration!

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04: Mid-Winter Thaw   The Devil's spring seduces womanly A russet blush, a warm sienna eye Winter, she pouts, is bitter contumely Its barren whiteness virginal and sly   No cold denial from these heated lips Her kisses thaw, her fingertips caress Her fecund belly burns, her flaming hips Radiate with urgent tenderness   Her passion is immediate and flashes Brightly as magnesium, its fuel The fume of love's forgetfulness, it crashes Hard as spurned addiction, and as cruel   For winter thaw is but a succubus Her promise is a hope she steals from us

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05: Lake Effect Snow Bands   I and my neighbor, blind, dirge sunny being As mountain-heavy clouds descend upon us Shrouded from the world, yet we are conscious Though nebulous in frozen shadow, seeing   Coronas of a solar memory Hover globular above the air. Like stones, we lie beneath a river where Currents white and chill blast history   To foamy recollections of the sky, But glaciers move and blizzards never tarry Time-laden winds rush evolutionary Albino night betrays its frozen lie   And with my reborn neighbor, I sing sight As alpine shade self-sweeps to sunny bright.

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06: Skeleton Heart   Its ribs are leafless, bloomless, crisp and stark Its dormancy is brittlely desiccated Its cold potentiality abated By sunlessness, unbudded in the dark   Its grasping shape enfolds itself in reaching Not opening, but gathering with need Its avarice, its black arthritic greed Denies all possibility of breeching   Loneliness, of opening with spring Of tapping warming earth, of harvesting   The wheat of winter, sap of February The sugar that a winter kiss can carry   As with a kiss the warming is begun And with a kiss is loneliness undone

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07: Snowshoe Spring   Spring in snowshoe slippers stands extended Each ear cocked to hear a daffodil Or crocus stirring skyward; Spring stands still. For stark-winged Winter's stalking is not ended   By thawing breezes yet; Winter, aloft Sets shadows drifting on the shifting snows And Spring, her nervous foot still planted, knows That sharpness strikes when shadows seem most soft   Spring, however, is not poised for bolting Spring, contrarily to sense, is molting   Spring is gazing summerward and pining Spring, in pussywillow mood, divining   That Winter, sunward climbing, is content in Ceding earth to Spring and seasons Lenten

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08: Crows at Dawn   In chorus, winter crows ascend to gray Once-dormant shadows sifted from the night They scatter, clattering, "Away! Away!" And sleepy morning shudders into flight   Strokes of charcoal shimmer, blackly croaking Gossiping of emerald and blue Sparking coal with scarlet sun, invoking Flame where once was only ice to view   Japanese in their economy Their inky wings define the paper sky Their furnace bellows forge in harmony The twilight requiem that night dies by   "It's day! It's day!" they caw, in dawn delighting With every joyous call the dawn requiting

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09: Eye Contact in a Mirror   Refraction and reflection are baroque When equinoxes arc in rainbow leaps The prism paradox: the light that keeps Its separate divisions must evoke   Whiteness in kaleidoscopic cages Brightness in shadow-defining lines Meanwhile it is darkness that defines The ends and the beginnings of the ages   Subatomic distances are vast Years are quashed as seconds swallow hours Time it is that timeliness devours As youth denotes the future of the past   We are not defined by what we see The eyes of others tell us what we be

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10: Spice Winds   I am the spice wind, Mercury of fire I channel cargo hot with blended passion Skin-scented, salty, foaming with desire Hers is the heat of peppery flirtation   Ginger is her eye, mandrake her glance Clove-coy is her whispering, her hint The tartest cinnamon, the dance Of cayenne, lip on lip, the sharpest mint   Casks contain her, barrels cooper-tight Crates and cartons, bursting with delight The hidden love truths, flavorful and bright The phosphorescent mysteries of night   But I the wind will never taste her flavors I sing the breeze imagination savors

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11: Silver Tree   The silver tree, precursor of spring Sets its tender shade for violets; Still ungreened, it is slender thing But vibrant with the life winter forgets   No longer dormant, not yet fully woken The yawn of branches murmurs in the dawn. The song unsung, the greeting yet unspoken Hangs cautiously above the winter lawn   A song of daisies woven in a chain A song of blushing robins, chatterring A summer song of roses brash and vane The bee song, droning, prone to flattering   The sleepy blossom rising in the shade Of slender trees. Thus is a summer made.

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12: The Healing Words Can Bring   The shaman is a man of healing phrases Rhythming the vibrancy of bones Lunarly defining sanguine phases In tides of energy through homophones   His syllable is heart invigorated His tone is earache nullified; an eye By his druidic chanting is dilated His is the word that pain is cushioned by   What medicine have we to offer now? No science-ish elixir can we brew No white or silver powder can endow What chicken soup already will not do   So I return to lyrical and sing To give you all the healing words can bring.

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13: Spring, the Spendthrift   A monument of object permanence is spring, a persephonic repetition as decadent as hope, its opulence rococo in its dense redefinition   Each branchy latticework is recreated Each grassy matrix resolidified Each meshy rootling is rejuvenated Each tangled twig diaphany defied   Behold the grasses' loamy racination Enormous in its plausibility Each root, each blade, each cell a fascination Defined in existential mystery   A time of prodigal enormity is spring, spendthrift of possibility

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14: Between the Earth and Sky   Between the earth and sky is emptiness The difference that plus and minus be The space that is unspace is added, less The distance stretching me to you to me.   An endless subdividing calculus Multiplies infinitesimally Gigantically the shrinkage between us Increases with our triviality   Yet spring has once again defied the lie That stoic solitude is defined by   Despair can not withstand the daffodil The crocus or the sunny windowsill   A glance, a touch, a smile, a caress Reveal the void as silly nothingness

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15: Reluctantly Rising   The crocus, painted by the robin song Chortles morningish; the lusty earth Is belching color, burping deep and strong Shuddering its richly lozenged girth   Lilac billows, bellowing the dawn Unfolding daffodil is an aubade The lover, woken, all to soon is gone Whose warm embrace is coldly sung abroad   The seedling tune is flower, bud and fruit Before the day is nearly woken; Time Demands the morn allow the suit Of evening matrimony, autumn rime.   Stay crocus, do not sing the siren day Signal, rather, sun to stay away

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16: Courage   Colossal, Courage striding, hero-tall Bronze and brash, sun-sharpening, a bright Epitome, dividing spring and fall Zenith to winter nadir, day to night   At times the slightest spark, is Bravery Shadow-emergent, tickling the dawn Facing night when light is yet to be The early star that day is borne upon   Tender is Strength, patient, powerful Comfort nurtured yearly, ring by ring Earth ages measured confident and tall Season defining, summer shadowing.   Courage, Bravery and Strength, I've met She is a woman I will not forget

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17: The Cardinal   Singing friendlessness, the cardinal Is singular in challenges; no weave Defines his melody, no carnival Of subtlety--none will he conceive.   A two-tone clarion of territory With two-tone clarity of stay away His two-tone anger paints his history As only two-tone black and scarlet may   So, bird, why rankled by your solitude? Fashioned by your insolicitude?     Your spite is armor that your anger wears, Your loneliness the price that anger bears,   Your territories self-inflicted cages Companionless, soliloquitous stages

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18: The Bottle Left Behind   The Monday morning bottle, Wednesday filled Discarded and still disregarded, parched Among deluging puddles, rainbows arched In glass confinement, arc-light undistilled.   A bitter liquor, left behind, undrained Is wet unwantedness, a child's ploy Of washing in self need; the mirrored joy Of joy is wanton wanting unrestrained.   A want of wanting is the bottle's end Deposit unreturned its currency Drowning in its deep redundancy The depths to which a puddle will intend.   Sparklight, glasslight, gutter unreflected This is the Monday Saturday rejected.

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19: Maypole Memories   This light is undiffused in memory Pine-needle sharp, pine shadow snaps the day Prism shafts detect and scatter me Pungent nostalgia carries me away   Among blueberries pieces of me lie Between strawberries, parts have come to earth I am clover, green and snowy, I Cradle moss across my stony girth   The coldest summer breezes carry me To granite shores as merciless as truth Among the runes beside the icy sea My weathered heart warms in the sun of youth   Bright then dark, thawed then frozen, we Are maypole mad, my memory and me

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20: Crows at Dawn   When the honeysuckle breezes blow Mast-high canopies are set aglow Gold above and shadowed plum below Anticipating waves of indigo   Midsummer night will slowly overflow Midsummer's banks, unstoppable, and so Midsummer tides will mark the ebb and flow Midsummer blends, next day from day ago   The inking of the sky, adagio Sinks groundward, where the contrapunctals grow Seeping upward in larghissimo Till dawn crescendos, in patètico   The tempo of midsummer nights is slow The honeysuckle breezes make it so

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21: Aubade   Who are you, you who open me with song? You who whisper nightly in my ear Who vanish when the sun is shining strong But in the moonshine ever resting near.   I have no memory of melody Though tune there is, though voice is clear and sweet When noisy waking chases dreams from me The singer flees who I am wont to meet   Are you rustic, folkish orchestrated? Or are you modern, rakish, syncopated?   Is your opus soft soliloquy Or loud and raucous, love in symphony   When will I wake and sing the night's duet I know so well, though daily do forget?

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22: Crows at Dawn   The fiddler Mephisto, goblinesque Is magic lanterned on the shadow wall I wonder is it short or is it tall His indirect, distorted arabesque?   Upstage or down, Mephisto shuns the spot His ballet is a shattered mirror, glinting A funhouse dance, all sharp and angled, hinting At dramas Mephistopheles begot   Proscenium and ghostlight are his frame Riddle scrims and strobelight are his tools Stagecraft and illusion are his rules Quicksilver fingers are his fiddle's fame   Légerdemain, Mephisto-eque is magic Léger de soul, ecstatic and phantasmic

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23: The Restlessness of Longest Days   The restlessness of longest days creates A lassitude, undreaming on the bed Disconnected puzzle thinking, head Shattered by impatience. Thought awaits   Its pattern. Double helixed. Twice entwined Unraveled. Then rebraided. Knotted thrice. The riddle tangled in its own device An misconnected network serpentined   Upon itself, tongue-twisted, languageless The germination of an ivy thought Groping outward, gathers, grows, is wrought In iron logic, cast orderliness   And losing spontaneity, is rent Unmade are how my longest days are spent.

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24: The Seeds of Memory   The sticky seeds of memory attach And each needs picking off; their oil's Aroma, sweet, nostalgic, always spoils Into age's vinegar, and thatch   Is where the stalk ends when the cutting's done. The grain birds warbled in the rye, inviting The dandelion in the sky, delighting In the breeze beneath the smiling sun,   And newly green, impressions yearned to fledge To latch, to cling, to travel in the mind To germinate, each blooming thought defined In sharpest vision, finely honed in edge   But autumn's yeasty kernel must ferment And blurred similitude bring bafflement

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25: Storm at Solstice   Rain, prophetic, flocks across the grain Sweeps and swarms, gathers fury, lapses Instinctual in pattern, blind synapses Shouting teleology, insane   The childish wind, competitive and vain Rises up with witless force and sways Its brash insistence surges and delays Uncertain what bravado can attain   The liquidness of woodlands stems the day's Flash flood of lunacy, cool depths declaring Rain and wind will cease, and their warfaring Subsequently still, fades into haze   Thus are summer's adolescent ways Diagnosed a solsticery phase

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26: Crows at Dawn   The calculus is part then part then part But life divided doesn't cut so clean Midpoints shift, and endings still unseen Oscillate and redefine the start   A game of quarters may by thirds, and then Be reassigned an eighth or two, timeout Be called, a rain delay, a scoring rout Require mercy with a lead of ten   Mid year, mid season, middle of a life Is meaningless for those who keep a score A life begun extends, and evermore Retreats to meet it, slicing like a knife   Do not measure time by time remaining Treasure, rather, all that time is gaining

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27: Man Unfated (a dialogue)   I am puppet master.                    Are you, now?   Stringless, I am destiny unbound, Leapful, I am mindless of the ground. I fly.          I see you, but I don't see how You back that boast. Your weight seems deeply rooted.   Rooted? That's foundationless! You jest at my expense.              At your expense, but lest you can tell me how my hand is mooted I stand by my claim.                     Distain, have I for downward thinking.                         Sinking, you must mean.   "Slinking" is my word for you. Demean me not with sharp-tongued serpentines.                                      Nice try! But I the puppet hand will guide your moving.   My independentness is your disproving!

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28: Liquid Light   Light is liquid, dripping from the sky Smelted, melted, molten, formless jelly Furnace softened, super-heated by A bellowed sun, poured from the cauldron belly—   Into layered shadows as baroque As iron lace, as heedless of the day As night is, latticework wrought to invoke Nature's labyrinthine growth--each ray   Hardening on forest flooring, cooling Globular and waiting to be folded Stretched and twisted, subject to the tooling Breeze's pattern. Evening thus is molded   Out of noon, and coolness comes of burning And crystal dreams are forged of shapeless yearning

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29: Pithy Rain   How pithy is the rain when nattering postmodern in its multi self concerning Its humor has the knack of scattering punchlines pregnant with wry self returning   Self-applauding thunder echoes lightning Self-including drainpipes mimic fountains Self-extruding cumuli at height sing self-deluding claims of shaping mountains   Rain, intrusive, rues all inattention loud, effusive, raucous, raw invention inconclusive, sometimes (thought retention is elusive), pounding permutation   quippingly, tongue trippingly, in quest of the perfect percolating jest.

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30: Crows at Dawn   Humidity, oak-heavy, corky, rough Rattles with cicada song, expands Contracts asthmatically, then countermands Insistence, sighs, sees being as enough   Drunk with indolence, for want of breeze Stillness, slothful, sits, anticipating Drowning in inertia, out-waiting All participation, sinks and sees   Swallows, brash and busy, beckon strongly Flourish garishly, exaggerating, Gesture semophorically, berating Patience in repose, as action wrongly   Equivocates inactive and inaction Boldly dissatisfied with satisfaction

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31: Sun on the Trunk of a Familiar Pine   Here is a wisdom carved by many snows Bas relief of sun and sunless pressed In craggy texture, summer juxtaposed With frost, the wood is stressed and is unstressed.   How many sunsets, blue with winter's chill, What dawn accumulations count the thaw, What summer noons, what autumn days? And still Your anniversary returns. Who saw   Your germination, seedling years ago? Who squirreled a forgotten hoard? And then Your middling years of adolescent show Evergreen and ever green again.   With friendly, craggy face you greet the sun And I, refreshed, a new year have begun.

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32: Adirondack Evening Pines   Blooms of jade expand in chlorophyl Stems of shadow, stems of dusty shine Inorganic in their angles, still As frozen time, climb amongst the pine   The smallest petals, sharp, are stony flint They sparkle, sparking motes of tinder light And bursting rainbow rays of evening hint At jeweled night, when starry dreams ignite   Each needle is its prism self, and yet Each is kaleidoscopically connected Within the petaled pattern, each is set To channel and collect what is dissected   The canopy collects the setting day And jealously sequesters it away

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33: Bacchanalia of Corn   A lawn of giants, maize is risen high Soon shorn to stubble, now July has passed Full straight, the corn was never meant to last After its seeding height. Life slides by.   Do not sigh for maize, its shafting rage Shot strong to skyward, day by night by day Rain-thirsty and sun-hungry, morning May To twilight in October, youth to age.   Such golden pride! Lascivious in greed Luscious, sensuous, yet rigidly Aggressive, maize expands repeatedly Don Juanish in success, excess, indeed!   The cornucopia by rights is born In the Bacchanalia of corn.

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34: Monstrous Summe   Monstrous summer bulges, pumpkin fat Ripe breasted, swelling bellied, full of face All smothering in motherly embrace Yet she is adolescent for all that   Grotesque coquette, a ripened ingenue Burlesque conquest, maturity seducing Winepress empress brazenly producing Fecundity, inebriation too.   Capricious and tempestuous in [mood] [tone] feeling Pacific and imperious as well Her romance is deciduous, her spell Is disingenuous, although appealing   We dote on summer, even past her prime As autumn comes a-courting summertime

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35: Impressions of Tivoli Gardens   While moonbeams minueto in the pond Mingling with lake-deep stars, romancing Shimmering remembrance and dancing, Ripple-ringing shoreward and beyond,   The virgin lights of Tivoli recall The first and latest melody they sang Their maiden carillon that skyward sprang From water, voice and harmony and all—   Fluid once and timpanous again Flowing jolt and ebbing relaxation, The liquid borders of emancipation Spinning manic and dynamic when   The splash of fountains dances rhythmless— Cobalt dreams shine deep in fathomness

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36: Dawn and Golden Rod   The corn is gone and golden rod supreme Its fountain plumes frost crisp in champagne sun Window lace and wild carrots gleam Icy white, defining day begun   The day's pre-seed awaits the breezy dawn Cloudy, it gathers, honey slow above The sod, a silk unwoven, cream upon A glaze, the fingers of a sugar glove   Royal-blooded purple, thistles shouting Adolescently seductive, flushing Aggressively ingenuous, and pouting Shy as roadside petals bluely blushing   Are quieted by gold and ice and day Humbled in the golden rodded day

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37: Contrails 9-11   A theatre matte, a seamless, rollered blue Barometry-constructed tight as linens Stretching frames as brittle and as new As faith: the scene where memory begins   This empty stage presages passion plain, Broad-shouldered swaths of boulder cumuli Wagnerian in splendor and as vain As Alps: alarum: entrance: autumn sky   Summer, though, is dominant today No brush stroke streaks the stolid azure mood No wisp of whimsy white has slipped astray Nor somber bruise of purple's stormy brood   Save challenge-crossing sabers straight and bright Two contrails in memoriam of flight

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38: Autumn's Progress   Autumn, cider-pressed, is pulp and juice Tart canary, tangy scarlet, blue Vanilla, pumpkin, lemon, plumb and puce A cataract of pigment, seeping through   A draping muslin gauze of pourous shrouds; It drips and drops around a skeleton Basalt black and sharp, light hung upon Defining darkness, branches under clouds   Bole and foliage, cathedral tall Stain the air like glass, a corky frame Musty, musky, gathering a flame Of maple caramel defusing all   In brittle barley candy and the red Is dipped in syrup, ripe and sweet and dead

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39: Bonny Step   The bonny step, meticulous, is spry In disingeuousity, is sly When carelessly it skips trippingly by The casual and sharply focussed eye   Self-reverential in its modesty Its only pair its partner, seemingly Self referential, all that all can be Duality of sensuality   Dote, middle age on kisses past, with pride Liaisons, some admitted, some denied All is forgotten--conquered and untried— Whenever next a bonny step is spied   Sing bonny left! Sing bonny right! And smile! Step, bonny, left! Step, bonny, right! Beguile!

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40: Autumn Toils   As winter's scythe is poised and harvest coils, while celtic-labyrinthine myths abide among the pumpkin vines, subside and rise in misty tendrils, Autumn toils   peasant-sturdy, wizened, leather-palmed, industrious but faded, elbow-worn, a many-colored coat, now pale, torn and patched upon its back, embalmed   in chestnut oil, pumpkin seed and musk of buck, unvelveted and sharp, the sting of mixing rain and rime, Fall gathering the cycle to its climax, dawn and dusk   melanged in frosty, spicy ales, augmented by the seasoning of seasons, time fermented

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41: Crows at Dawn   the night is brittle as the marble moon and life a treble reed vibrato, keen and tight; the hope is for a clean unsharded shattering, but soon   the muddy morning will emerge and clouds entomb all focus in a sepulcher of unforgiving nothingness; under their weight intent is smothered in the shrouds   of mediocrity, fragility reduced to flabbiness, a dreary haze of pointlessness, the endlessness of days definitionless in bourgeoisie   bohemian to proletarian jewel dream to grey quotidian

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42: The Ethic of Profit   The candle is diffused, the writing is confused, the second movement compromised sloppy timpani, unsynchronised bemused, the playing syncopating is   unmodern and unjazzy, just a mess not intertwining, only twisting sound the back and front and melody confound the harmony, the compound musicless   were it light, the focus would digress were it thought, its logic, unadvised meander would, ending unrealized sightless, guideless, hopeless of success   this is the ethic of the modern profit rigid myopia, a drunken prophet

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43: All Souls' Eve   Still spirited in immortality Humanity interred is restlessly Averse to lying danceless endlessly And so is prone to vain vitality   Skipping trippingly through sepulchers Spritely, wightly, white among the tombs Cryptless, corpseless, molting catacombs Swiftly, shiftingly, death de-inters   Scherzo-crazy, liltingly robust With joie de mort, ghastly esprit de nuit A wistful, waltzing, shedding of ennui Or full mazurka-mad, by moonlight thrust   Above the treetops, leaping in the skies Till barrow dawn the dancing soul denies

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44: All Souls' Day   A solid morning, robin-egg and rose carves threats of frost on saplings, bushes, branches boles denuded, passion-blushed; day blanches, windless, cruelly honest. Silence knows   the night's excesses howled conflagration chanted their corporeal jubilation chorussed joyously their titillation immodestly exceeded expectation   Light, seamless, sky to street, repose Commanding passionless proration In motionless respite of night's elation Starlight bayed by what the daylight shows   Unmasked, October cedes its mottled crown November, naked, wears an icy frown

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45: In November   I hang suspended, unresolved, not frost Not crisp, not crystalline, not white Nor fog, nor cloud, nor mist, nor hoar, nor bite Of icy tongue, of frozen lung, am lost   In nether air, imagined, shadowless A waiting winter, baited breeze, a ridge Of cloud, horizon-threatening, a bridge Unbuilt, unfallen, fields farrowless   And fallow, wet and woolen, sodden, dank Dull of fancy, whimsy-less and blank   In need of seed, a mote to freeze to snow A thought to sharpen, hone and mill and grow   Cypher to nil, to point, to line, to ray. But partnerless, I linger and delay.

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46: Holiday Season   As day is night as much as it is day And sun is cloud and rain a snowy threat (But do not fret, is is not winter yet!) The window curtain chases gloom away   We hibernate, we burrowers, we coil In cozy dens, and gather in our dreams We brew imagination, and what seems Becomes what is; a pleasant, scented oil   Decanted sparingly yet luminous Precious yet unhoardable, it burns As soon as it is gathered, as it turns Constricting dark to light, voluminous   And generous, a festival of giving Each to each the happiness of living

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47: Winter Falls   Procrastinating, Winter hangs like snow a russian waltz spun in the air, perambulous a silk and crystal web, meanderous oblivious to how the seasons go   Deciduous, the world, suspended, sighs decrying such asynchronistic games Unnostagic, Time has pressing aims that cold suspension stolidly denies   Time, whispering in Winter's ear, insistent Blowing northerly, imperious Then southerly and moist, erogenous Time, impatient, also is persistent   as twilight swings her hasty metronome and just like that the world is monochrome

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48: Approaching winter storm at sunset   Flaming salmon rending pearl and plum stretching the confectionary skies a flash of lithium to caramelize the fluid day to hard effluvium   sterling cold and molten gold are fused; the welded edge where day and night combine: a bead of winter; the start and end define the alloys of a season that are used   in recipes of molten floss and brews of twirling, curling, swirling spiral flows of iron taffy, copper ribbons, bows of oyster, and quicksilver curlycues   Heaven too heavy, heaven drops to ground and snowy silence sifts, devoid of sound

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49: An Invocation   Solstice bright, tallow sight, a flame a miracle of thaw in birch and pine sap aromas, cinnamon and fine yellow saffron flour, in her name   No winter sprite, this hearth's delight, no djin no Nordic mystery of frozen moss ablaze, no goblin hostess, she, no cross of stone and woman, blended in   the fancy of a pagan fever; see, by saintly ship delivered, not a muse but patron of the darkness ended, fuse to spark imagination, lovingly   Lucia, saint who gilds the coming day Burnish me and light me on my way

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50: Eclipse of the Red Solstice Moon   The winter candle glows its fullest light Once solstice snuffs the burning sun away These, the longest night and shortest day Are wick and flint, first strike, then spark then sight   The roundest moon is waxing and will wane Full glow to new to glow again within A single dusk to dawn, then will begin Its patient month of gain and loss and gain   Such lunacy! The darkest and most bright In waltzing circles, passionate and flushed A month of sun and moon, urgent and rushed Narcissistic, blushing in the night   A night, a month, a year, an age end soon Six hundred years of cycling the moon

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51: The Final Christmas Candle   The final Christmas candle flickers low Shimmering with optimism still Its positivity undying till The wick is done. I refuse to blow   The flame to smoke, the light to sooty night; I watch the ceiling, patternless, aglow with aimless cheer, a random ebb and flow, the walls awash with radiant delight   With heavy eyes, I stare with gazing greed To hoard in dreams the never-waning flame, to fill my cache with pigment is my aim, to gather light as rodents gather seed   Then will my rhyming cease to be a chore And color trim my wordiness once more

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52: Year's End   A melancholy thaw to end the year tripping through the village like a fool staggering with vestiges of Yule alcoholic vapors, stale beer   Roadside snow, thrown off like blankets, bright no longer, icy crusts that cut like knives of memory, reflections of our lives time-eroded, rusting, grey and white   The year, corroded, weakens at the knees soon to be knackered, glue to future life; overworked, and beaten down by strife the nag year shuffles weakly through the trees   Unhappy age, I leave you wheezing, falling I mount a stronger steed, for hope is calling

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