with miracle,
rebirth and rebirth.
Come to the manger
without frankincense or shoes.
Bring only your hunger
for what you dream
you cannot bear to lose.
ADVENT
Tugging his shoulders after him,
flimsy rake tines tremble through leaves
dank and flat as stripped skin.
Down his thighs his muscles grieve
their work under pewter skies.
December’s stainless steel winds
incise the bared face of his alibis.
He is naked neck to shins
under these clothes, and alone.
Roots beneath his feet, he’s been told,
hold these waving branches down.
He feels how deep they are. And cold.
The necessary work lags, stalls
against this iron ground freezing
into permanence. He pulls
night closer with every swing.
Painfully, he leans forward.
Indistinct mounds surround him.
The moon disappears. He looks toward
the house, its sharp edges growing dim.
Soon he must go in. The wind
is rising, nailing leaves to the trees
and his rake again. The ground
beneath one golden window glows.
ADVENT SONG: WOODEN ANGEL
She knows.
She tries to tell the traffic
moiling through the blowing surge,
peach-pink streetlights
just coming on, fuzzy with snow.
They cannot hear her
for their radios and icy wipers.
The snow collects light
despite the growing dusk.
She heralds its glowing
reflection, its hoarded joy,
sun and moon somewhere else,
just gray light enough
to release my window panes
and set embroidered animals
dancing. An old engine,
the radiator steams
beneath the windows.
I fill one chair.
My angel of the sill
welcomes me also
with her wooden horn,
but I am not the one
she has waited for
seed to split to trunk
in that wide stand of pine
where the snow also blew
and melted, the life
before this life
of paint and jubilatio,
further intervention
of the shaping hand,
sanding fine as skin
to another’s touch,
strokes of expression
doweled and ribboned,
transplanted here.
She practices her song
too perfectly to be heard.
She teaches me to wait,
to praise with her the traffic
inching past, attend
to the song of silence,
the song of cold
that brings the fire
that never is consumed.
Her wooden cheeks
never empty of breath
call us all day.
The snowy light
has almost reached
her shoulders, turning her
horn silver. The light
arrives on waves of music.
Soon it will reach me.
THIS STABLE GROUND
Bull, donkey, lamb, goat, cow.
They share the redemption
of cell and story, fierce frost searing
them a little less, yet still palpable
as this birth, as rich with blood.
They stand peripheral
and hear the cries, woman and child.
They smell the active bringing-forth,
steaming breath like his. They escape
eternity together, into this
cold air where he is caught
with rough cloth, dried and held
