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The Art of Living, and: New Year
The Art of Living
We have more than a room—rooms!—in our little house.
All over America people are getting fat in front of their flat screens, eating junk.
All over our pretty house yesterday grievance plastered the walls.
I’m just sayin’.
Perpetrating misery in (practically) luxury’s lap; how evil is that?
It’s so last week, so over.
Get up, little darlin’. I’ll make you an egg. [End Page 118]
New Year
Praise to the man or woman who stays open to the river of each day. Praise to her or him who keeps, past sixty and in all weathers, an open heart.
Remember nineteen? The pair of us walking at midnight in the city and stopping at someone’s, anyone’s, front stairs (those concrete steps, the Richmond in San Francisco) —ignoring the cold, ignoring the strangers who must be annoyed inside—to sit and talk excitedly, laughing or moving ourselves to tears like Chekhov’s drunken Russians, needing to say the vast, inrushing perceptions of just one day.
—You weren’t the one I walked with. I let the poem lie, knowing it wouldn’t matter: you’d have your own city, you’d have been giddy before you grew old, and apprised.
Praise to the man or woman who stays open to the river of each day. Praise to her or him who keeps, past sixty and in all weathers, an open heart. [End Page 119]
Jeredith Merrin is the author of two collections of poetry, Shift and Bat Ode, and a book of criticism, An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Uses of Tradition. Her essays, reviews, and poems have been published in The Hudson Review, The Paris Review, and Slate.
