Sunday poetry: "Desert Highway, New Year's Eve"

Jonathan Gottschall, in The Storytelling Animal, writes that humans process life through stories. That may explain why I love years. By that, I am not talking about the events of any particular year -- though I am thankful to say that I have never had an entirely bad one -- but the concept of years themselves. They are not stories, but we gladly treat them as though they are. Magazines reserve their final issues to write about trends and identify the most significant people. Statistics take on a new resonance. Award groups begin compiling lists of contenders, and critics finalize top-ten lists. (When I was a teenager, awaiting Owen Gleiberman's favorite-movies list in Entertainment Weekly was a secular ritual of sorts.) Again, there's quite a bit of contrivance -- wishful thinking, really -- in pretending that a sequence of events that began on Jan. 1 reaches some kind of resolution on Dec. 31. From March 25 this year to March 25 next year will cover a 12-month period too. But it's tidier to align those bookends with the actual beginning and end of the calendar, and part of being a storytelling animal, after all, is imposing order on chaos.

Or, think of it this way: Even if we're not ready for the new year, the new year is ready for us. Grand statements are in order, and those can be fun. In my last newsletter to the sixth grade, I started with a quotation from Van Morrison's song "One Irish Rover," which doesn't actually mention dates but has been known to resonate over my classroom speakers in December:

     Tell me the story now,
     now that it's over.
     Wrap it in glory
     for one Irish rover.
     Tell me you're wiser now;
     tell me you're older...

The story (let's just call it that) of 2023 is over, and I will let the pundits of the world wax philosophical about it. For the purposes of this space, I will simply thank John Brantingham, Jane Edberg, and the rest of the staff of the Journal of Radical Wonder for providing a wonderful platform -- not just for me, but for all the other poets, essayists, critics, fiction-writers, and artists who contribute to its scroll on a weekly basis. Through the Journal, I have made new friends, reconnected with old ones, lined up guest speakers for my classroom, and in general relished the act of creation, which is our greatest antidote to despair. I also commend the magazine for giving me the incentive to revive this blog, which had sat dormant for nearly four years before the Sunday poetry feature began in March. Most of the poems published in Radical Wonder have been old ones, but just blogging about them has awakened me to how I've grown as a writer and thinker. It is nice to have a voice.

As the weeks neared Dec. 31, I mulled over which poem I would use to cap off the year. The easy choice was "Desert Highway, New Year's Eve," especially given that New Year's Eve falls on a Sunday this year. Then, I realized that the poem had a pair of sequels; in my catalog of poems, I have one that is set on Jan. 1 and one on Jan. 2. The three poems were not intended as a series and originally appeared in different books, but they work as a sequence when put in order, at least for me. I asked John if he would be up for publishing all three poems on their respective dates, and he gave the go-ahead. So today's poem will be the first of a trilogy, to be followed tomorrow by "To Rachanee, Laguna Beach, Jan. 1" and Tuesday by "Day After New Year's."

Starting with the first poem, then: "Desert Highway, New Year's Eve" dates back to 2010 and grew out of a single line that I jotted years ago on a bus ride in England. It was late in the day, and the fading colors outside the window gave the trees a damp, congealing look. I grabbed a scrap of paper and scribbled the words "The earth grows tighter in the bleeding dusk," and a variation on that line later made its way into the poem. "Desert Highway" is not about that bus ride, but rather about two fictional characters who stop to view the sunset on a less-than-harmonious drive. The man feels that he has let the woman down, and as he lies in bed later, he fantasizes about her being the only person left on Earth, savoring the wonders of creation with no meddling partner in her way. Scientists predict that the world will end in 7.59 billion years. The poem's protagonist imagines it ending tonight. On New Year's Eve, we sometimes think in those hyperboles.