For many years now, Sheila E. Murphy has been offering a poem as her holiday card to friends. Her text for this year is worth reading a dozen times or more, its logic, phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence, is so intense & hard-edged. I thought to share it here.

 

Toward the Year 2006

One whittles something, perhaps to reckon with an atmosphere in which the strategy remains produce, send forth, consume. From the cold the wild geese fly away. In a pattern of advance/recede, velocity’s amended. The human spirit falls to virtuosic silence. As if to shift the factual in favor of the show. Perception’s inexperience informs oncoming history, whose viscosity inverts clear thought during deliberation of a wood quintet.

A trellis poised mid-snow, hosting the myth of climb until it’s so