found the People Incomplete

It's cold here, too. Maybe not like it is where you are, but maybe even a little sadder for the surprise of it. The garden certainly was unready.

Year's End


Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I've known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.


Richard Wilbur

I think there's something very comforting in the idea of being an incomplete person--maybe just because it's a nice name for a tricky idea, and we always like it when tricky things have nice names. More time, indeed. If wanting more time to do things means being incomplete, that certainly beats the alternative.

...Not that living in the future is any good either, as this time of year continually re-proves. But if you can own and even enjoy the incompleteness, maybe you can have a nicer present.

I wish nice presents for all of you.