Susan Elizabeth Howe

(A fortune cookie) Ominous inscrutable Chinese news to get just before Christmas, considering my reasonable health, marriage spicy as moo-goo-gai-pan, career running like a not-too-old Chevrolet. Not bad, considering what can go wrong: the bony finger of Uncle Sam might point out my husband, my own national guard, and set him in Afghanistan; my boss could take a personal interest; the pain in my left knee could spread to my right. Still, as the old year tips into the new, I insist on the infant hope, gooing and kicking his legs in the air. I won't give in to the dark, the sub-zero weather, the fog, or even the neighbors' Nativity. Their four-year-old has arranged his whole legion of dinosaurs so they, too, worship the child, joining the cow and sheep. Or else, ultimate mortals, they've come to eat ox and camel, Mary and Joseph, then savor the newborn babe.

A comfort common to Southwest desert parking lots, a familiar, a messenger, an overlooked angel oiled by asphalt, consolation of the casino, supermarket spiritual guide picking at a free-today hot dog, a dropped grape or lentil, its purple-green head iridescent, its long keel of a tail. Black birds but not blackbirds with their showy epaulettes blood-red as a war field. Grackles glint like lacquered ebony, the females brunhildas, if by brunhilda you mean “brown-headed,” not the German “ready for battle.” Blind to centuries of borders, of battles, they waddle stiff-legged at your feet, a janitorial sweep to their tails, checking cart tires and light poles for moths, beetles, singing their seven songs — slides, whistles, wheezes, catcalls, chirps, murmurs, clucks — to console you for your losses: stolen cars, mortgage payments spun to mist at a roulette table, the beloved who breathed fire and scorched your wedding clothes.Folly,wreckage, they mutter, down among the packs of backerboard and spackle.We’ve fallen from Mayan temples. In a past life

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.