New Year's Day

Usually I'm so brimming-over
with gratitude
on the most ordinary of days; so what
if the shift from one year to the next
doesn't make me a model
of equanimity? So what
if a new year beginning
cold and brilliantly lit
finds me still a little rankled
by the year that just passed,
the letdowns,
quotidian horrors, pissy problems,
the minor frictions?
What, in the larger scheme, could matter less
than my briefly burning state of mind,
my body racing to its end?

Hourglass Nebula photographed by the Hubble telescope, NASA

Only twelve more months now
then they'll flood me again with email
subject lines all the same, so
it seems they follow some divine guidance:
"Time is running out!"
--as if I need reminding--

 
I look to the floor;
the frame of my vision 
captures something smaller,
the cosmos reflected in a pool,
the lens of my eye.
I can't see very far, I tell you.
If I came from a large world 
it's not where I now live;
nor yet will I return, I think,
to what or where I was.
 


©2015 Ravenna Taylor