January

All these Januarys dissolve in the water-glass of my mind.
As time drains away, they lie grains in the sediment
of my memory.

The last of the year trickles out, come and gone
and I grasp at the hope of the glass filled to the brim anew,
awash in possibility.
“This is the year,” I might say, “where happiness
conjoins with reality to birth at last
joy, in my own circumstance,”
—before all evaporates
in its own time.

New year.

Happiness

The yellow ashes of happiness
are always a lure to the passengers.

Distance puts everything in perspective.
We raise slow heads to watch
empty wisps—
all they raise from the dead—
and do nothing.
How fell, our lives,
How far we fell.