39 Christmas poems

Evening: the nervous suburbs levitate. Height does us no harm, now we are high above the mineral pools, above the flash hotel whose only use is treachery. Someone knocks on a door and you crouch behind the bed. Down in the bar, the small girls toast their parents, the brother breaks a large bone for its marrow. I’m thinking of a challenge for us all. The star in the sky has traveled all the way from home. Now follow that!

We assemble the silver tree, our translated lives, its luminous branches, numbered to fit into its body. place its metallic roots to decorate our first Christmas. Mother finds herself opening, closing the Red Cross box she will carry into 1976 like an unwanted door prize, a timepiece, a stubborn fact, an emblem of exile measuring our days, marked by the moment of our departure, our lives no longer arranged. Somewhere, there is a photograph, a Polaroid Mother cannot remember was ever taken: I am sitting under Tia Tere’s Christmas tree, her first apartment in this, our new world: my sisters by my side, I wear a white dress, black boots, an eight-year-old’s resignation; Mae and Mitzy, age four, wear red and white snowflake sweaters and identical smiles, on this, our first Christmas, away from ourselves. The future unreal, unmade, Mother will cry into the new year with Lidia and Emerito, our elderly downstairs neighbors, who realize what we are too young to understand: Even a map cannot show you the way back to a place that no longer exists.

Her sickness brought me to Connecticut. Mornings I walk the dog: that part of life is intact. Who's painted, who's insulated or put siding on, who's burned the lawn with lime—that's the news on Ardmore Street. The leaves of the neighbor's respectable rhododendrons curl under in the cold. He has backed the car through the white nimbus of its exhaust and disappeared for the day. In the hiatus between mayors the city has left leaves in the gutters, and passing cars lift them in maelstroms. We pass the house two doors down, the one with the wildest lights in the neighborhood, an establishment without irony. All summer their putto empties a water jar, their St. Francis feeds the birds. Now it's angels, festoons, waist-high candles, and swans pulling sleighs. Two hundred miles north I'd let the dog run among birches and the black shade of pines. I miss the hills, the woods and stony streams, where the swish of jacket sleeves against my sides seems loud, and a crow caws sleepily at dawn. By now the streams must run under a skin of ice, white air-bubbles passing erratically, like blood cells through a vein. Soon the mail, forwarded, will begin to reach me here.

The kings they came from out the south, All dressed in ermine fine; They bore Him gold and chrysoprase, And gifts of precious wine. The shepherds came from out the north, Their coats were brown and old; They brought Him little new-born lambs— They had not any gold. The wise men came from out the east, And they were wrapped in white; The star that led them all the way Did glorify the night. The angels came from heaven high, And they were clad with wings; And lo, they brought a joyful song The host of heaven sings. The kings they knocked upon the door, The wise men entered in, The shepherds followed after them To hear the song begin. The angels sang through all the night Until the rising sun, But little Jesus fell asleep Before the song was done.

for Vincent Warren Behind the black water tower under the grey of the sky that feeds it smoke speeds to where a pigeon spreads its wings This is no great feat Cold pushes out its lust We walk we drink we cast our giggling insults Would you please leave the $2.50 you owe me I would rather not talk about it just now           Money bores me I would like to visit someone who will stay in bed all day           A forest is rising imperceptibly in my head not a civilized park I think it would be nice this “new moral odor” no it would not mean “everything marching to its tomb” The water tower watches over us            Is there someone you would like to invite        no one.

Let midnight gather up the wind and the cry of tires on bitter snow. Let midnight call the cold dogs home, sleet in their fur—last one can blow the streetlights out.   If children sleep after the day’s unfoldings, the wheel of gifts and griefs, may their breathing ease the strange hollowness we feel. Let midnight draw whoever’s left to the grate where a burnt-out log unrolls low mutterings of smoke until a small fire wakes in its crib of coals.

O little fleas of speckled light all dancing like a satellite O belly green trees shaded vale O shiny bobcat winter trail Amoebic rampage squamous cock a Chinese hairpiece burly sock A grilled banana smashes gates and mingeless badgers venerate The asses of the winter trees rock on fat asses as you please Be jumpy or unhinged with joy enlightened fry cakes Staten hoy.

Christmas is coming. The goose is getting fat Please put a penny in the old man’s hat. If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do. If you haven’t got a ha’penny, God bless you. Tonight the wide, wet flakes of snow Drift down like Christmas suicides, Layering the eaves and boughs until The landscape seems transformed, as from A night of talk or love. I’ve come From cankered ports and railroad hubs To winter in a northern state: Three months of wind and little light. Wood split, flue cleaned, and ashes hauled, I am now proof against the cold And make a place before the stove. Mired fast in middle age, possessed Of staved-in barn and brambled lot, I think of that fierce-minded woman Whom I loved, painting in a small, Unheated room, or of a friend, Sharp-ribbed from poverty, who framed And fitted out his house by hand And writes each night by kerosene. I think, that is, of others who Withdrew from commerce and the world To work for joy instead of gain. O would that I could gather them This Yuletide, and shower them with coins.

This seablue fir that rode the mountain storm Is swaddled here in splints of tin to die. Sofas around in chubby velvet swarm; Onlooking cabinets glitter with flat eye; Here lacquer in the branches runs like rain And resin of treasure starts from every vein. Light is a dancer here and cannot rest. No tanagers or jays are half so bright As swarms of fire that deep in fragrance nest In jungles of the gilt exotic night Where melons hang like moonstone. White above Rises that perfect star, the sign of love. On carpets’ fairy turf, in rainbow dark, Here once the enchanted children laid their heads, Reached for the floating moon above the park, And all their hopes were simple blues and reds. Beneath the electric halo, none could see Swords in the ankle of the victim tree. Each named a patron star: Arthur said green For August in the country; and Betty blue For swinging and the Florida surf; while Jeanne Decided gold. One horoscope was true: The star of Donald low and lava-red— Enlisted Donald, in Australia dead. Our lives were bound to sorcery and night. Zodiacs crumble on the boughs of rust For every child is gone. Some burned too bright And now lie broken in the bins of dust; And some, a fortunate few, adventured far And found assurance in the perfect star.

How should I now recall the icy lace of the pane like a sheet of cellophane, or the skies of alcohol poured over the saltbox town? On that stony New England tableau, the halo of falling snow glared like a waxy crown. Through blue frozen lots my giant parents strolled, wrapped tight against the cold like woolen Argonauts, searching for that tall perfection of Scotch pine from the hundreds laid in line like the dead at Guadalcanal. The clapboard village aglow that starry stark December I barely now remember, or the brutish ache of snow burning my face like quicklime. Yet one thing was still missing. I saw my parents kissing, perhaps for the last time.