My 2025 New Year's Poem

 EARTH ANGLE (poem for January 1, 2025)

 

Everything in here is angles. In the glare of

day and the dead of night. The way

the walls meet the ceiling. The rectangularity

of the windows and squareness of the panes.

The dresser is angles. The chair

is angles. The mirror in the corner,

angles. The light fixture is perfectly

circular, a sneaky angle disguised as an anti-

angle. The cobweb stretches across

the ceiling at a 52-degree angle. The merest

draft and it’s 53 degrees. The paintings

by Barbara Caruso contain angular
shapes in precise colours on canvases

mounted on wood squares and rectangles

built for her by Nelson Ball. Where

the paint flakes off the ceiling above,

it does so at deliberate angles. The clothes

hanging from hangers: their per-

pendicularity is angular.

                                      And I am this dollop,

riddled with bristles and filled with guts

and aqueducts, lying on a rectangle,

typing on squares within a rectangle, my

roundish head propped up at

an angle against a wall that holds

a window through which, if I were

a periscope, I could see a few

blackbirds pecking at the hard snow

covering the parking lot next door,

looking for stray seeds or frozen snails.

One of the birds says to another,

“Happy new year.” “What’s,”

the other says, “a ‘year’?” Then

all the birds laugh and perform

an extraordinary terpsichore

I swear I’ll never forget.

 

 

Stuart Ross

1 January 2025