It Would Be Neat If with the New Year
For Miguel
It Would Be Neat If with the New Year - meaning Summary
Loneliness as Worn Footwear
The poem uses a simple domestic scene to show how loneliness and hardship become inseparable from the speaker’s identity. His "leathery loneliness" is likened to an old pair of boots: scuffed, chewed, and well-worn but comforting and necessary. Music and memory animate the boots, turning past wrong turns, addiction, and travel into a lived fit the speaker keeps wearing. Ultimately the boots symbolize endurance, belonging, and love’s rough labor.
Read Complete AnalysesIt would be neat if with the New Year I could leave my loneliness behind with the old year. My leathery loneliness an old pair of work boots my dog vigorously head-shakes back and forth in its jaws, chews on for hours every day in my front yard— rain, sun, snow, or wind in bare feet, pondering my poem, I’d look out my window and see that dirty pair of boots in the yard. But my happiness depends so much on wearing those boots. At the end of my day while I’m in a chair listening to a Mexican corrido I stare at my boots appreciating: all the wrong roads we’ve taken, all the drug and whiskey houses we’ve visited, and as the Mexican singer wails his pain, I smile at my boots, understanding every note in his voice, and strangers, when they see my boots rocking back and forth on my feet keeping beat to the song, see how my boots are scuffed, tooth-marked, worn-soled. I keep wearing them because they fit so good and I need them, especially when I love so hard, where I go up those boulder strewn trails, where flowers crack rocks in their defiant love for the light.
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