Farewell and goodnight to two-thousand-eleven.
We’ll toast your ascent into Calendar Heaven.

Hello and good morning, two-thousand-and-twelve.
We have bottles to empty and books to unshelve.

Goodbye and good riddance, December the last.
The best Christmas present: you’re now in the past.

How joyful to see January the one’th.
Though I figure this year will fly by in a month.

Well, Xmas happened on schedule and I have emerged on the other side of it. Have you?

Today is Back To Work Tuesday for us unfortunate cogs who don’t get the whole holiday week off. To celebrate, this evening here in Hamilton we get a dose of snow disguised as rain. The season’s first snowfall and it’s nothing but a low-energy mitten-soaker, adding some extra blah to the slough of deadness between holiday weekends. (A Special Weather Statement for our area cautions that there may be a flash-freeze overnight, which bodes darkly for tomorrow morning’s unfortunate-cog commute. Speaking of deadness.)

In Measure for Measure, Lucio describes Angelo as: a man whose blood is very snow-broth. Yeah. Snow-broth. A slightly silly Shakespearean way to say ice water, but it strikes me as the correct name for the stuff that falls out of the sky in this sort of not-quite-freezing winter weather. Tonight’s snow-broth spends a few hours raining straight down, without wind, a steady shower, all business, thudding wetly on the window panes and glazing the sidewalks in an insipid slush reduction, accumulating zero.

I get the above photos when I go out walking to return a library book and to get a closer look at the downtown holiday lights before they’re taken down. I stop by the big Xmas tree in front of City Hall and circle the other big Xmas tree in Gore Park and pace back and forth under the canopies of the park’s strung-up tree-branch lights. Weather spatters my glasses and camera lens, saturates my hat. The snowy air and rainy pavements make all the lights’ glows bleed in a pretty and melancholy way, though I suppose they were already doing the pretty-and-melancholy thing well enough on their own these past two days, being holiday lights still up after the holiday’s over and gone, lingering, looking all post-jolly, after-merry, ex-festive, etc.

W.H. Auden, “The Sea and the Mirror”:

Well, who in his own backyard
Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he cannot quote?
Which goes to show that the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of fact we love
Is unsubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.

Paul Chowder, the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, talking about bygone-era periodicals like The Century that made a habit of publishing lots of poems in each issue, but as little more than decoration:

The long nonfiction piece comes to an end, and it’s about being a stevedore in Baltimore, something like that. And then at the bottom of the page is this poem in two columns, with six stanzas, and each stanza has indentations, and the conventionality and vapidity of it will stun you. “The shades of summer’s bosky hue, o’erlie thy modest floobie doo.”

(Pause while I snicker uncontrollably for a few minutes. — Also, Baker’s jokey imitation couplet makes me think of Holmes’s “Æstivation” … i.e. a parody of badness that’s almost too good.)

Continuing:

The editors of The Century didn’t expect you to read that poem with your full mind. They knew it was just some rhymes thrown pell-mell together with some cornstarch. They knew full well, because this is America, land of bad poetry. Yes, sir! Bad poetry, sir! Loads of it in the back, sir! Just keeps coming. Tipped in. The shovel eases the soft tonnage of poetry over the rim, and it just pours into the pit, pluth.

Holiday fun fact: On Canadian bilingual packaging, the French name for eggnog is “lait de poule” — chicken milk.

Just a quick note here to say that I could not be happier that the insane presidential candidate whose first name is my last name (how embarrassing) is finally political toast.