Monday Poems: "Toward the Winter Solstice" -- by Timothy Steele

Although the roof is just a story high,
It dizzies me a little to look down.
I lariat-twirl the cord of Christmas lights
And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
Will accent the tree’s elegant design.

Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
And call up commendations or critiques.
I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
We all are conscious of the time of year;
We all enjoy its colorful displays
And keep some festival that mitigates
The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.

Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,
But UPS vans now like magi make
Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
Are gaily resurrected in their wake;
The desert lifts a full moon from the east
And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
And valets at chic restaurants will soon
Be tending flocks of cars and SUVs.

And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
The fan palms scattered all across town stand
More calmly prominent, and this place seems
A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
This house might be a caravansary,
The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red.

Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
It’s comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born.

* * * * *

This poem appears in Timothy Steele’s most recent book of poems, Toward the Winter Solstice. His earlier poems are collected in Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986 and The Color Wheel. He has also published two volumes of literary criticism focusing on the lost arts of prosody and versification.

Much of Steele's poetry is written in traditional verse, using meter and rhyme, and so has been credited with contributing to the New Formalism movement in poetry.

Steele's work has earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Los Angeles PEN Center’s Literary Award for Poetry, among other awards. He lives in Los Angeles and is a professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles.