Goodbye 2004

I was invited to two new year parties tonight, but I decided at the last minute not to go to either. After an evening nap, I made a simple dinner of beef broth with acini de pepe and sliced pork with onions and chili. I turned on the TV and witnessed more images of the tsunami's aftermath in South Asia and Southeast Asia. CNN was also showing how various countries heralded the new year - fireworks, candlelight vigils, bells.

This is probably my quietest new year's eve, and I kind of like it this way. Over the past few days, I've cleaned up my living room, did some laundry, finalized my reading list for the class I'm teaching next year (but not the entire syllabus yet), opened a new tub of ice-cream, and most recently, in Singapore, LK has received the keys to our new home.

2005 will be an interesting year - I will determine where I'm going to be after graduation, I have a new home to design and decorate, I will be reunited with LK - no more of this living apart and leading separate lives - and I will have finished my thesis. I hope the coming year brings peace to everyone around the world, particularly those who need it most.

Year's End

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.

~ by Richard Wilbur

Posted by Monoceros at December 31, 2004 9:37 PM