Ghost of Myself

VICTORIAN HOUSE GHOST, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

2014

Following Halloween, I like to change the bow on my ghost
and leave her out for the remainder of the year.
Thanks to my friends Claude & Sue who wrote:
"Your lace Ghost of Christmas Past
is one of best yard decorations we've seen!"

2018

The following two poems -- "i am running into a new year" by Lucille Clifton and "in celebration of surviving" by Chuck Miller -- have appeared recently on several different blogs and New Year posts and websites. Yet, I've never seen them posted together. As my contribution to the conversation, I will compare and contrast, in keeping with my goal to provide "a poem for every poem."

Here they are side by side: Clifton's almost middle - aged narrator, "running into a new year"; Miller's almost elderly narrator standing outside in January, coming "through on the stretch in a photo finish." The two narrators contemplate various ghosts of themselves as they resolve to take the New Year and run with it. Even so, they spare a moment to reckon with the ghosts of "Auld Lang Syne" [literally: "old long since"; idiomatically: "long long ago," "days gone by," "old times' sake]. I like to think of these poems as "Auld Lang Syne" reveries, midnight resolutions to cut loose the old trappings and embrace the new energy of the present. As Robert Burns reminds us when we put his poem to music every New Year's Eve, we drink the cup of kindness now.

Clifton begs the ghosts of her old broken promises and her younger selves to forgive her for choosing the present over the past. Miller stands, however briefly, in the "golden envelope" of the present -- not the past, not the future. What matters more is history as we are living it moment by moment; not history as we look back on it. The present is real; the past and the future are imaginary. Or is the opposite: there is no Now; there is only Before and After?

Remember what Thomas Jefferson said:
“I like the dreams of the future
better than the history of the past."

Contemplative essayist and novelist Scott Russell Sanders (American, b 1945) has the perfect phrase for what is happening in these poems. He begins the new year by sharing this thought from a friend: "Memory grips the past and hope grips the future." In both poems, you can feel the icy wind of winter, and the exhilarating wind of change:

i am running into a new year
i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

~ Lucille Clifton (American poet, 1936 - 2010)

******************************

in celebration of surviving
when senselessness has pounded you around on the ropes
and you're getting too old to hold out for the future
no work and running out of money,
and then you make a try after something that you know you
won't get
and this long shot comes through on the stretch
in a photo finish of your heart's trepidation
then for a while
even when the chill factor of these prairie winters puts it at
fifty below
you're warm and have that old feeling
of being a comer, though belated
in the crazy game of life

standing in the winter night
emptying the garbage and looking at the stars
you realize that although the odds are fantastically against you
when that single January shooting star
flung its wad in the maw of night
it was yours
and though the years are edged with crime and squalor
that second wind, or twenty-third
is coming strong
and for a time
perhaps a very short time
one lives as though in a golden envelope of light

~ Chuck Miller (American poet, b 1939)

Thanks to Katie Field for recommending Lucille Clifton;
and to Peter Bunder for recommending both Chuck Miller
and Scott Russell Sanders

More on this topic
and these poems next time . . .

******************************

January: Always a Time for
Gazing Forward & Hearkening Back

Christmas Forward Backward ~ January 15, 2016

Perfect Twins: Going Out, Coming In ~ January 14, 2016

Janus, Orpheus, Obsolescing ~ January 30, 2011

January: Forward Vision, Backward Glance ~ January 28, 2011

Janus ~ January 8, 2010

Fast Away the Old Year Passes ~ December 28, 2009

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Monday, January 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com