This Was The Year

This was the year I caught Manhattan’s early spring
off-guard – bare-assed – all barren rock and infant grass –
naked as a fuzzy ugly eaglet. This was the year I gave in

to the tumbling New York City summer – let the blunt
force trauma of its humid torrid volupté have its exorbitantly
sinful way with all of me: discovered in tree-ripened peaches

reaches of a thundering penumbral sweet embrace for
which I hadn’t until this year found a conscious place. This
was the year the autumn demonstrated that it knew the lurid

colors of the darker regions of the Universe quite well:
this was the year it offered up an orange moon as horrible
and wonderful as hell. This was the year I grew to know

the winter solstice: let it bolster me with its grave
ambiguities and learn they have a rumbling lot to do
with my own destiny. This was the year I felt my body, bones

link to the reeling wheel – its spokes and bumps throughout
the months – found I was indistinguishable from its feel
and apparatus, spin and rise and fall: that I was bits

and pieces of its rolling all. This was the year I stopped
expecting “deep” and found “complete.” This was the year
my psyche might just finally have had enough to eat.



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