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Wind whistling, as it does in winter, and I think nothing of it until it snaps a shutter off her bedroom window, spins it over the roof and down to crash on the deck in back, like something out of Oz. We look up, stunned—then glad to be safe and have a story, characters in a fable we only half-believe. Look, in my surprise I somehow split a wall, the last one in the house we’re making of gingerbread. We’ll have to improvise: prop the two halves forward like an open double door and with a tube of icing cement them to the floor. Five days until Christmas, and the house cannot be closed. When she peers into the cold interior we’ve exposed, she half-expects to find three magi in the manger, a mother and her child. She half-expects to read on tablets of gingerbread a line or two of Scripture, as she has every morning inside a dated shutter on her Advent calendar. She takes it from the mantel and coaxes one fingertip under the perforation, as if her future hinges on not tearing off the flap under which a thumbnail picture by Raphael or Giorgione, Hans Memling or David of apses, niches, archways, cradles a smaller scene of a mother and her child, of the lidded jewel-box of Mary’s downcast eyes. Flee into Egypt, cries the angel of the Lord to Joseph in a dream, for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. While she works to tile the roof with shingled peppermints, I wash my sugared hands and step out to the deck to lug the shutter in, a page torn from a book still blank for the two of us, a mother and her child.

Bethlehem in Germany, Glitter on the sloping roofs, Breadcrumbs on the windowsills, Candles in the Christmas trees, Hearths with pairs of empty shoes: Panels of Nativity Open paper scenes where doors Open into other scenes, Some recounted, some foretold. Blizzard-sprinkled flakes of gold Gleam from small interiors, Picture-boxes in the stars Open up like cupboard doors In a cabinet Jesus built. Southern German villagers, Peasants in the mica frost, See the comet streaming down, Heavenly faces, each alone, Faces lifted, startled, lost, As if lightning lit the town. Sitting in an upstairs window Patiently the village scholar Raises his nearsighted face, Interrupted by the star. Left and right his hands lie stricken Useless on his heavy book. When I lift the paper door In the ceiling of his study One canary-angel glimmers, Flitting in the candelabra, Peers and quizzes him: Rabbi, What are the spheres surmounted by? But his lips are motionless. Child, what are you asking for? Look, he gazes past the roofs, Gazes where the bitter North, Stretched across the empty place, Opens door by door by door. This is childhood's shrunken door. When I touch the glittering crumbs, When I cry to be admitted, No one answers, no one comes. And the tailor's needle flashes In midair with thread pulled tight, Stitching a baptismal gown. But the gown, the seventh door, Turns up an interior Hidden from the tailor's eyes: Baby presents like the boxes Angels hold on streets and stairways, Wooden soldier, wooden sword, Chocolate coins in crinkled gold, Hints of something bought and sold, Hints of murder in the stars. Baby's gown is sown with glitter Spread across the tailor's lap. Up above his painted ceiling Baby mouse's skeleton Crumbles in the mouse's trap. Leaning from the cliff of heaven, Indicating whom he weeps for, Joseph lifts his lamp above The infant like a candle-crown. Let my fingers touch the silence Where the infant's father cries. Give me entrance to the village From my childhood where the doorways Open pictures in the skies. But when all the doors are open, No one sees that I've returned. When I cry to be admitted, No one answers, no one comes. Clinging to my fingers only Pain, like glitter bits adhering, When I touch the shining crumbs.

You could almost think the word synonymous with mind, given our so far narrow history, and the excessive esteem in which we have been led to hold what is, in this case, our rightly designated nervous systems. Little wonder then that some presume the mind itself both part and parcel of the person, the very seat of soul and, lately, crucible for a host of chemical incentives—combinations of which can pretty much answer for most of our habits and for our affections. When even the handy lexicon cannot quite place the nous as anything beyond one rustic ancestor of reason, you might be satisfied to trouble the odd term no further—and so would fail to find your way to it, most fruitful faculty untried. Dormant in its roaring cave, the heart’s intellective aptitude grows dim, unless you find a way to wake it. So, let’s try something, even now. Even as you tend these lines, attend for a moment to your breath as you draw it in: regard the breath’s cool descent, a stream from mouth to throat to the furnace of the heart. Observe that queer, cool confluence of breath and blood, and do your thinking there.

I’m a tranquilizer. I’m effective at home. I work in the office. I can take exams on the witness stand. I mend broken cups with care. All you have to do is take me, let me melt beneath your tongue, just gulp me with a glass of water. I know how to handle misfortune, how to take bad news. I can minimize injustice, lighten up God’s absence, or pick the widow’s veil that suits your face. What are you waiting for— have faith in my chemical compassion. You’re still a young man/woman. It’s not too late to learn how to unwind. Who said you have to take it on the chin? Let me have your abyss. I’ll cushion it with sleep. You’ll thank me for giving you four paws to fall on. Sell me your soul. There are no other takers. There is no other devil anymore.

You know how, after it rains, my father told me one August afternoon when I struggled with something hurtful my best friend had said, how worms come out and crawl all over the sidewalk and it stays a big mess a long time after it’s over if you step on them? Leave them alone, he went on to say, after clearing his throat, and when the rain stops, they crawl back into the ground.

—a found poem Each grief has its unique side. Choose the one that appeals to you. Go gently. Your body needs energy to repair the amputation. Humor phantom pain. Your brain cells are soaked with salt; connections fail unexpectedly and often. Ask for help. Accept help. Read your grief like the daily newspaper: headlines may have information you need. Scream. Drop-kick the garbage can across the street. Don’t feel guilty if you have a good time. Don’t act as if you haven’t been hit by a Mack Truck. Do things a little differently but don’t make a lot of changes. Revel in contradiction. Talk to the person who died. Give her a piece of your mind. Try to touch someone at least once a day. Approach grief with determination. Pretend the finish line doesn’t keep receding. Lean into the pain. You can’t outrun it.

What will survive us has already begun Oak galls Two termites’ curious self-perpetuating bodies Letting the light through the gaps They lay out their allegiances under the roots of an overturned tree Almost always better to build than to wreck You can build in a wreck Under the roots of an overturned tree Consider the martin that hefts herself over traffic cones Consider her shadow misaligned over parking-lot cement Saran Wrap scrap in her beak Nothing lasts forever not even the future we want The President has never owned the rain

the seven songs After joy raises you into the stratosphere, ride earth’s colors as you wheel down. Fear backs you into a cave, only then do you cackle and hiss. Curse at a tornado and it might curse back. Why kick pebbles on your enemy? You will die without burying him. The ascent out of despair must be steady, slow, or your lungs will explode, your blood boil. Which is wisest: to endure hunger or waddle among wolves? Warn those you love when the predator approaches. Screech loudest when you are the predator.

If you don't get too close to people you can't disappoint them, which would be so much worse than letting them disappoint you. To the extent that you gain a perch that means other people look up to you, to just that extent you can never tell them how you feel. You can warble, or follow a siren, or a Shenandoah vireo, into the shade, or take advice from the lights: be a child, or be like a child. You will want for nothing, and you will never be heard.

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city, Mad-eyed from stating the obvious, Not proclaiming our fall but begging us In God’s name to have self-pity, Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range, The long numbers that rocket the mind; Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind, Unable to fear what is too strange. Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race. How should we dream of this place without us?— The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us, A stone look on the stone’s face? Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost, How the view alters. We could believe, If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy, The lark avoid the reaches of our eye, The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn As Xanthus once, its gliding trout Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return, These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken? Ask us, prophet, how we shall call Our natures forth when that live tongue is all Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean Horse of our courage, in which beheld The singing locust of the soul unshelled, And all we mean or wish to mean. Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding Whether there shall be lofty or long standing When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.