Maybe because it’s the first day of the New Year,
          today I know that sitting at a window

                    and looking out at a gray sky, snow falling

so finely, like mist, like fog, today I know
          that sitting and waiting for a poem,

                    sitting unsuccessfully

while watching the black smokestack across the river,
          tall and solitary and reminding me

                    of the dignity hiding

within loneliness,
          today I know that waiting,

                    then happening

to look up at just the moment
          when the streetlights go off

                    at 8:23 A.M.

(for the day is truly dark, dark almost
          beyond endurance),

                    today I know as I pause,

consider the stone arches of the old bridge-
          striations of mist, and uncertain light, the curtain

                    of fog, transparent, which blurs the world finally

into blue uncertainty—today I know
          that to sit like this and to fail

                    to write the poem

is precisely the fate—
the exact level of insurmountable difficulty—

          which I have been given in order to grasp

what I can of the world as it actually is,
          only grasp is the wrong verb entirely, rather,

                    to be submerged in, bathed in, as the baby

is bathed, baptized, in those old paintings,
          the holy crying out, the baby trying to swim away,

                    but he can’t escape,

that’s not what happens, you don’t reach
          dry land,

                    you stay like this, just like this,

whichever direction you look
          the blowing snow, the mist and fog, and today

                    I do know this much: the hell

of longing for life to be what it’s not must now come
          to an end for me, on this the beginning

                    of the newest year yet lived by anyone, ever, on earth.