A ZUIHITSU FOR THE WINTER SOLSTICE

A ZUIHITSU  FOR THE WINTER SOLSTICE

Once, the Christmas cards were organic: potato prints, pasted trees, stamps sealed with spit. Friends who wrote letters summing up their activities had many activities. The list of friends was long. On occasion, an elderly uncle was deleted or a distance grew too great. This year I noticed many changes. Some addresses are longer: unit names, apartment numbers. We all send simpler cards and the list is shorter. More occasions. Greater distances.

Many years ago, I attended a little church that has since been converted to apartments. One Christmas Eve, when the church was lit only by candles and smelled like balsam and frankincense, a friend with a beautiful soprano voice sang “How Far is it to Bethlehem?” unaccompanied. Last spring, her funeral was an occasion. 

I have never abided in a field by night, watching a flock of sheep. I have been struggling to think of an equivalent: weeding the garden, perhaps, but I've never done that in the dark. I’ve decided that the best I can come up with is ordinary work, work that is somewhat tedious and common, but necessary. Picking up the living room, washing dishes, changing sheets, hanging clothes—that sort of thing.

Five animals that I know are passing through the scrap of woods on the north and east side of our house: gray fox, common raccoon, American black bear, deer, bobcat.  Seventeen birds that I know are in the woods, or in the back yard:  red-bellied woodpecker, hairy woodpecker, downy woodpecker, pileated woodpecker, white-breasted nuthatch, goldfinch, junco, chickadee, mourning dove, blue jay, raven, house finch, cardinal, tufted titmouse, crow, barred owl, and the great horned owl who was calling the other night, when I brought the dog outside in the moonlight. 

I have never been serenaded by the Heavenly Host. But now and then something, perhaps somewhat angelic, has broken through the darkness, or the tedium:  An oriole singing by the roadside, two owls on silent wings swooping close over my head, a coyote watching me from the edge of the woods, two deer running toward me in the fog. It’s interesting how often those experiences involve animals. Perhaps all of them do.

In The Hogfather by Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite Christmas books, Death (who has been substituting for a Santa Claus figure) says, “HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. . . YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.  (“So we can believe the big ones?” asks Death's granddaughter Susan.). . .YES. JUSTICE, MERCY, DUTY, THAT SORT OF THING.”

I find it interesting that the sign that a savior has been born to the shephers is a baby in a manger. Really? The story is so familiar and common, and even tedious, that it’s hard to remember what a very strange thing that would be.

MAGI GOING HOME

MAGI, GOING HOME
 

 

 Go home another way, 
 it told us in a dream. 
 Another way?
 

 What would an angel 
 know about ways? 
 We had to sell the camels 
 

 and the slaves. Another way 
 meant bad roads, no roads. 
 We were not accustomed 
 

 to walk, but walk we did 
 till we bought a donkey. 
 It was old and lame.
 

 We rode in turns. We were not 
 accustomed to taking turns, 
 nor to buying food ourselves. 
 

 Now and then we begged,
 and more than once 
 we slept in stables, in the straw—
 

 the only lodgings we could find 
 after we were robbed of everything. 
 But that’s another tale. 
 

THE NEXT DAY

THE NEXT DAY

The women awakened before it was light

and gathered together some things she’d need.

They found her there, curled on her makeshift bed,

clumsily nursing the child at her breast.

Her husband was still sound asleep.

 

Surely the men were crazy, all the commotion.

Angels and voices in the sky.

A warrior or a king, or somesuch

come to free them from their lot.

Well that was fine.

 

But here was the inexperienced mother.

They covered the straw with the cloth they had brought,

and settled the baby more comfortably.

They fed her the potion

to make the blood stop and the milk come down.

A few sparrows stirred awake in the rafters.

No sign of an angel anywhere.

NAME THE PLACE

NAME THE PLACE

 

. . if you can, where a woman in black velvet

wears a hat constructed from balloons.

Before a roaring fire,

people are singing Nowell.

 

Banjo and fiddle, washtub bass and guitar

echo through the hall.

Now everyone is singing

“Feeling Groovy.”

 

An aproned man carves turkey.

A woman offers a bowl of potatoes.

Boys and girls run to and fro

bearing pitchers, and plates of cake.

 

A magician pulls

a rainbow from his mouth

while children shout

words to make it real.

 

Everyone is there:

a man who recently bought oxen,

the one who took a wife,

a woman from the highway,

 

a beggar from the hedge.

a man most inappropriately dressed,

Santa Claus, and look!

there’s that maiden, all in blue.

 

ONE ANNUNCIATION

ONE ANNUNCIATION

 

Who can tell about angels?

They pass over sleeping cities scattering death,

make appalling announcements,

play ominous music on brass instruments.

Who can tell?

 

She beckoned with her tiny index finger,

looked around to see if anyone would hear.

I leaned down so she could whisper in my ear:

Angels. Angels came to visit me in the night.

She’s been here only four years,

what can she know?

“Were they friendly?” I asked.

NO! she shouted, alarmed,

looked around again, whispered again,

They were VERY BIG.

They said “Shhhhh.”  

They said

“Listen.”

 

This was told to me many years ago by a priest friend–the “I” in the poem.

A THANK YOU NOTE

Dear Santa Claus,

I learned long ago
that you were really my parents.
Dad built the doll beds
and Mom dressed the dolls.
Often my wishes were not
granted because
they had no money.

But I want to thank you anyhow
for the feeling I always had
on Christmas morning
when I woke in the dark
knowing that you had come.
Thank you for the certainty
that it was the light step
of your reindeer on the roof
that I’d heard.  Thank you

for bringing me, sometimes,
better things than I’d wanted
even though I hadn’t been
very good:  the ballerina
with jointed legs,  the microscope
in the wooden box.  I still
have them.   And thank you
as well for the disappointments.
The cheap Betsy Wetsy knockoff.
The pale blue mohair sweater
comes to mind, too, though
by then, I’d stopped believing.
Life is complicated.  Thank
you for teaching me that.

O, Santa, I want you back again.
I want the Christmas tree lighted
when I get up on Christmas morning.
I want an orange in my stocking.
On the table by the rocking chair
I want to find that empty plate and cup.
I want to hear again the faint jangle of bells;
I want a dust of snow on the living room floor.

3.19.13

WRITING A SERMON, DECEMBER 23RD

    I wrote this in 1998.  Our son came home from a semester in England, and we met him at the airport.  I hadn’t yet written my Christmas sermon.  This is essentially the poetic version of the sermon that resulted.  It was published in The Other Side the following year.

 

Drove to Boston, four hours in wet snow.
Already tired, late flight coming in,
and I’m preaching Christmas Day:
something about snowgeese, maybe,
the way they change the landscape
even after they’ve flown away–
the way God changed it once,
by making human footprints.

Half the world is here, waiting for planes.
A tall kid in a baseball hat
slouches around, looks at his watch, drinks a coke.
Passengers from France are surfacing.
The kid spots a first class woman in a suit
crisp and red as a poinsettia,
dances on his toes,
hollers, “Here Mom, over here!”

A thin woman from the back of the plane
stands still as the last tree in the lot,
touches one enameled fingertip to a shadowed eyelid,
shoulders a cheap vinyl bag.
Roaring into the crowd
–did he ride his Harley through this snow?–
a man in a motorcycle jacket
who has not forgotten her.
The lights come on all over town.

The plane from Lisbon lands,
the watchers shift and hum.
A tiny black-eyed boy breaks away,
screaming “POPPY!  POPPY!”
runs through the NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL barrier
as if he’s authorized,
throws himself at an old man carrying an umbrella, a paper sack.
Poppy drops his burdens,
raises up the child.
I see ten thousand white geese.
I see starlight on the snow.

The plane from England touches down, taxies in.
The doors open.
When after all these months I see my son
I know that together we have one face,
the face of God,
of someone being born.

STUNNED BACK TO BELIEF WHILE THE MEZZO SANG “HE SHALL FEED HIS FLOCK”

I wrote this back in 2003, (I think) after practicing “Messiah.”  The mezzo was Wendy Hoffman-Farrell, and this poem is dedicated to her.

. . . I always used to believe he would,
but lately, with life wandering out of control–
beasts, sharp edges everywhere–
I have not been so sure.

Concentrating on my part–
the crazy alto timing in “He shall purify,”
the slippery bits in “Unto us”–
I was forgetting to listen.

But then her voice.
Not like light–
not clear, star-studded, disturbing,
the dangerous sky of a wild and wakeful night–

but close and warm and dark,
the safe dark when everything that can harm is asleep,
the comforting dark when you have been gathered up
and peek out at the puzzling world
from the folds of his robes,
the happiness of his encircling arms.