January: Year-day 3

           
                                         
                                        
January: Year-day 3
                                           
Having started stiffly, loosened, then flown,
I am anxious to work deeply, to last/
in whatever liquid, solid, or gas
my imaging powers assign to a poem
                                           
created to praise in this house, this home,
of this special year of days as they pass--
my United States two-hundredth blast--
for the starved, the ill, the rich, the alone.
                                             
That my Jeffersonian duties lie
too often slumbering, I--I know why;
that a tough keen Shelleyan madness stays
lost in the clouds, in the wind, in a lark
while I continue my flickery ways--
Thoreau, Emerson, Melville: Make me arc.
                                              
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