CLEAR SAILING: For Di and Steve
The cost of clarity is cold weather.
Fog kept the beach mild;
It clouded over the quadrantids.
New Year’s dinner, the four of us together,
I toasted: “Bewildered, and beguiled!
But when I raise my lids
No need to question whether
Four hearts are reconciled.”
Meanwhile, January rids
The beach of fog, and there’s never
A chance of warm retreat. It’s wild:
All softened unknowing forbid…
So we breast the chill, the clear-eyed pressure,
The sharp-horizoned world to which we are unreconciled,
But which strands us here, shivering, unhid.