"New Year's."
"The end of the year wears its face
in the moon against the disguises
one would otherwise put upon it.
It is the mild temper of midnight that embarrasses us.
And oh, we turn away into reassuring daylight
but backwards.
If it were the forward motion one wanted,
what tempers would not be resolved?
Can one keep the night out of it as or when it was there?
Darling, she had gone.
We speak as if there never were an answer.
We speak to the back, to sleep, to heads.
We are alone in the new minute, hour, or year, or nowhere.
House, your hand is too far from me.
Tree, speak.
The moon is white in the branches.
The night is white in the mind of it.
Love, tell me the time.
What time is it?
The second, the moment moving in the moon?
Of the strangeness of bending backwards until the mind is
an instant of mind in the moon's light
white upon an endless black desert, the sand,
in the night of the last moment of the year."
We're trying to hold all this pitch because
at no one point in that line is the thing actually gets stated.
In other words, the line there, I suppose, is so extended.
Because at no one point in that saying,
particularly in those last two lines,
that I feel what was imminent to say what was could be said,
could ever be located at any one point.
It was the whole issue of this reaching, which
New Year's means for me, I suppose, sentimentally enough.
The whole sense of what, where are we, and what have we
come to.
And if one complicates it by living in the desert,
we don't normally have time as an endless qualification--
but I mean, an endless possibility,
but you have space equally.
I suppose it's the truly existential position.
The next poem then is a--
it continues in part.
Duncan, who else with Olson, has been a most useful and kind
friend.
This particular poem, I'd like to say, dedicated to him
or wanted to have him think it some kind of offer.
Because of this, you'll see makes of the lady.
And I, coming from New England, have always
been very shy of any kind of use of the figure of this kind.
Except that in Duncan's poetry, this figure
takes on a very, very real character
as it does increasingly, you may notice, in the poems of Olson,
or it does in a parallel sense in the Denise Levertov's poems.
And this particular poem, anyhow,
involved a sense of reality that I
felt akin to what I'd learned from Duncan.