Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-2884)

On the morning of New Year’s Day, I drove out to Newbury Park to pick up my daughter from a friend’s house.  (I passed the Newbury Park library branch, which was closed, of course, but noticed that it looks like a nice one, and that it’s the anchor of a small shopping center, which must be convenient!  It’s part of the Thousand Oaks system rather than LAPL, so I don’t have a card there, but the next time I’m loitering in the area during business hours, I’ll take a peek.)

It’s a longish drive, so eventually I turned on the radio.  The first song I heard, and therefore the first song of the new year, was the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Dark Necessities,” which seems–both accurate and auspicious?  (That long tease of an intro, the song’s easy acceptance of the transience of everything–“You and I both know/Everything must go/Away”–and the strength of artistic intent: “Dark necessities are part of my design.”)

After we got home, I went to the shared workspace to write for a while.  It often happens that there’s something I need to read while I’m writing, and the first poem I read, and therefore the first poem of the new year, was Song of Myself, which–also accurate and auspicious–seems like exactly the right complement to the song, and to the day itself.

Here’s a piece of it.  (And by the way: almost every day of my reading and teaching life, I appreciate what the Poetry Foundation has done in putting thousands of good texts of poetry online.)