November Sestina

Now November slips away, half gone already
the spring concedes to summer and the birds call
long into the cloudy warm-pink night.
The city lives and breathes, in days of beer and river water
and, everywhere, the open doorway beckons
and the year that hurt us has laid down arms at last.

So, now, we drink every latte like it is our last
that lesson lodged deep in our guts already
the dice roll of every unknown future beckons;
the chance geometry of shrouded angel’s call.
But here we still are, born and once drowned in water:
here we still are, holding candles to the night.

And now day is renewed, and the night
for us, is over, and fear ebbs now at last.
In joyful mass we all surge back to water
to swim and grow sun-reddened; forgotten already
the other dangers here under this sky. No call
to memory undoes the way life beckons.

Ahead, the season of the solstice beckons
the preparation for our shortest night.
The open shops all ply their siren’s call
in baubles, trees and carols first and last.
Perhaps, this time, the truth is known already;
perhaps we all have been renewed in water.

And here we do not give thanks in November; no blessing water
flows through our hands to wash us clean, or beckons
to bow our heads and own aloud our mercy. Already
we are forgetting the deepest ink of night.
The miracle and the sadness is the way nothing will last:
not joy but not pain either, and not sweet summer’s call.

The year that hurt us ends in a quiet call:
We live, and laugh, and hold each other, the water
sanctified with the release of hearts at last.
For other places, a different passage beckons;
and winter closes in with hard cold night.
With tender hands, we hold our gift already:

This bright blue sky, this future born already
this daily-stronger farewell to the night,
this star-point now from which a new year beckons.