January 3, 2017

overhead: wild grapes

There was a poem about the post-holiday sidewalks I started to write,
the litter of Christmas trees denuded of ornament and fanfare. Garbage men
in their bright yellow vests appeared in the lines, too, as did the new, determined
recruits at the local gym, and the sweaty promises we make in the name of better health.
It would have been reasonable, then, to address the fresh checklists of fix this, change that,
how the turn of a year pushes the doing out of us. And yet, it wouldn’t stop raining today,
and all I could do was remember that cold, clear late afternoon in the fields beyond
my mother’s house, looking up at thin, bare branches stretching skyward and shaking,
slightly, in the breeze. How my own hands lifted and opened, and my body shivered
in sudden, unexpected certainty: There was still time. There would always be time.