New Year's Eve Plans

Whether you're attending a bash or staying home to fence with your dog ("Touche!"), have a v. happy last day of 2005.

Remember that tonight doesn't matter much (wear whatever); it's tomorrow, the first day of a fresh year, that should be made special. Last New Year's Day, we ice skated in Central Park with Tara and Liesl, then dined on corn bread and black-eyed peas at Liesl's place, then relived, over and over again in our mind, that New Year's Eve kiss--two soft mashing together of lips in Andy's kitchen. You only get to kiss him for the first time once. And even if you stay together your whole lives, the first year together dies, and then each moment afterwards does too. You know that advice, that we should live each day as if it is our last? Jeesh! Almost impossible to follow, but also impossible to avoid following, even if by accident. Which reminds us...

It is true, as someone has said, that in
A world without heaven all is farewell.
Whether you wave your hand or not,

It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes
It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,
Hating what passes, it is still farewell.

Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean
Over the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans
Diving, and the glistening bodies of bathers resting,

Are stages in an ultimate stillness, and the movement
Of sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body
Are part of the same, a simplicity that turns being

Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion
Worth celebrating, for what else does one do,
Feeling the weight of the pelicans' wings,

The density of the palms' shadows, the cells that darken
The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions
Of chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end

Is enacted again and again. And we feel it
In the temptations of sleep, in the moon's ripening,
In the wine as it waits in the glass.


-Mark Strand (From Dark Harbor)