I would like

At the end of this year, when I’ve been so often filled with horror, anger, and sadness, I sometimes find it hard to let go and fill instead with softness and calm. Then something catches me, like a song while I’m cooking (kitchens being the very best places, aside from cars, to listen to music and feel without restraint), and peace wells up in me, and I notice that I haven’t let go of the horror and the sadness but that there is space for everything inside. And then that feeling goes away.

Whether your New Years Eve is loud or quiet, I hope you get caught in a moment like that. And here’s a poem, I think it’s nice, and anyway it’s the only kind of thing I’d consider a New Year’s resolution.

(P.S. There are still 3 more spots left for my mushroom cooking class next weekend.)

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I would like
my living to inhabit me
the way
rain, sun, and their wanting
inhabit a fig or apple.

I would like to meet it
also in pieces,
scattered:
a conversation set down
on a long hallway table;

a disappointment
pocketed inside a jacket;
some long-ago longing glimpsed,
half-recognized,
in the corner of a thrift store painting.

To discover my happiness,
walking first
toward
then away from me
down a stairwell,
on two strong legs all its own.

Also,
the uncountable
wheat stalks,
how many times broken,
beaten, sent
between grindstones,
before entering
the marriage
of oven and bread—

Let me find my life in that, too.

In my moments
of clumsiness, solitude;
in days of vertigo and hesitation;
in the many year-ends
that found me
standing on top of a stovetop
to take down a track light.

In my nights’ asked,
sometimes answered, questions.

I would like
to add to my life,
while we are still living,
a little salt and butter,
one more slice of the edible apple,
a teaspoon of jam
from the long-simmered fig.

To taste
as if something tasted for the first time
what we will have become then.

— Jane Hirshfield