I’m at the end, riding the goat with snow-white hair

After Longfellow’s ‘The Poet’s Calendar’

Just past the stiff winds & half-dead leaves
I’m left shouldering a few stanzas
from the months that have passed before me.

My hair spills across this calendar, it has become
a river of ash, of absent pigment, of all
the losses collected in the strands & I am pressed

to these sepia pages, shrouding myself
in the cuttlefish’s ink, with only the tint-pinned
memories of Mayblooms, of monarchs & moth

& there are cracks in everything now &
it is easy to remain here in December, to let
these days become grave markers without names,

to miss the birth of the divine verses that open wide
the portals promising carols still left unsung—

Victoria Nordlund is the Poet Laureate of Glastonbury, CT, and lead master teaching artist of The Nook Farm Writers Collaborative at The Mark Twain House & Museum. Her poetry collections Wine-Dark Sea and Binge Watching Winter on Mute were published by Main Street Rag. Visit her at VictoriaNordlund.com