New Year's

by Dana Gioia

Let other mornings honor the miraculous.

Eternity has festivals enough.

This is the feast of our mortality,

The most mundane and human holiday.

On other days we misinterpret time,

Pretending that we live the present moment.

But can this blur, this smudgy in-between,

This tiny fissure where the future drips

Into the past, this flyspeck we call now

Be our true habitat? The present is

The leaky palm of water that we skim

From the swift, silent river slipping by.

The new year always brings us what we want

Simply by bringing us along—to see

A calendar with every day uncrossed,

A field of snow without a single footprint.