Year To Year \ New Year

Nancy:  Every year, the catalogues come earlier and earlier.  Already the mailbox is filled with catalogues: luscious vegetables, unbelievable flowers.  I’m a sucker: I fall for it every time.  And every time, the garden is so glorious, it’s so easy to do it again.

Year To Year

Winter’s barely begun when the catalogs

deliver their dreams of perfect leaves,

their fantasies of round red ripeness.

Ha, I scoff, where are the hares,

the hares and the slugs and the cabbage worms?

But why not?  Why not check the EZ Pick

beans, and the Bull’s Blood Beets?

What’s August for, if not the silky ears

of corn, the tomatoes, the zucchini

crying eat me, eat me?

How mean of me, to think that

I’ll begrudge the hare a taste of beans.

Check beans check peas check broccoli,

sing hey for tendril, twine and ramble.

And yes, it does come to pass.

The hares eat the beans, but

there are still too many.  Tomatoes escape

their cages, peas hide and we seek,

and we eat and we eat and we eat.

Hidden from us, garlic swells, carrots fatten.

We pick the last corn.  Roll the pumpkins

into heaps.  Shell out beans.

Take the spading fork and tumble potatoes,

large, small, laughable, miraculous,

what jewels, what wealth, what a year.

Soon, too soon, comes cold, comes snow,

comes catalogs.  Where are the hares,

I grumble.    Oh . . .  Oh, look . . .

An earlier corn?  A more perfect tomato?

And it comes to pass: I do it all over again.

Yes.

Alan:  I search along the edge of the bay for clues as to what the new year might bring.  Every time I return empty-handed.  The answer is out there, unreadable.

New Year

The tide today

does not flow in

so much as lift,

barely perceptible,

like a cloudy table

rising slowly

on silent, hydraulic legs,

filling each nuance

of the scooped,

impassive shore,

filling the marsh,

filling the mouths

of the small, still streams.

More solid, it seems,

than liquid: ice patches

scabbing the surface,

a substance one could fall into

or fly over, with one's eyes,

as if over Arctic seas

in a small plane, endlessly,

hypnotically,

just above the surface.

Rain falls

almost as ice

with a sound like someone

shuffling crisp cards

in a nearby, hidden dimension,

shuffling

and preparing to deal

the hands we will soon

be required to pick up,

study, and, with our careful faces,

play.