Fast Away the Old Year Passes

Have you heard of the International Fixed Calendar? This calendar featured 13 months of 28 days each, and was proposed in 1902. It is a very orderly looking thing — nothing at all like time (which may not even be a thing at all.) It is the season when I start thinking about time — how arbitrary and how relentlessly real it is.

Anyway, Happy New Year, Dear Ones. I will be continuing, 3 times a week (give or take) on the other side of the calendar page. May you be loved.

Rabbits leap into the shelter of a bare-branched hedge

as I walk through the predawn, unseasonably warm,

late December morning.

My body knows winter by the way the light rises and fades,

the way the moon glows through the bare trees

like a single, insistent finger.

All around me, nature moves its confusion

through a too-early thaw.

It is not time.

And yet —

The tulip polar reaches up from the bottom of the hill,

same as ever, we would say,

with our senses tuned to these units we call hours and days and such.

She lives a different way and

in her deep-rooted embrace of what is —

shows her endlessly mutable face.