Good morning from the darkness of our surprisingly large room at the Middlebury Inn. Outside the crows are cawing, the pigeons are chirping, the feed trucks and garbage trucks are trundling through the town center, and the town businesses glitter like those miniature buildings that decorate holiday train sets. Vermont under Christmas snow is very postcardy.

Here's an excerpt from my poem "Winter Fragments," the last poem in Calendar. I fear the formatting of the entire piece wouldn't survive the blog's automatic line breaking, but here's the last bit. In the original it appears on the righthand margin--a visual nod to the end of the old year, to the unknown new . . .

Yet in those long-ago winters
The little snowflakes fall very slowly.
The day passes, each hour a veil,
And under the snow’s weight the birches
Bow and loosen their hair.
How does anyone learn to wear flowers?

Essence of sky, upside-down wings.
The snow falls and the birches kneel
Like worried brides, and I turn to you,
Walking beside me, whose eyes look away
Into the fallen snow.