Poems for Advent 2017

Dec 3 Awaken — To Wake Up the Dead

Dec 4 Journey — Journey to the Center of the Heart

Dec 5 Gather — Gathering the Limbs of Osiris

Dec 6 Simplify — Plumb Simple

Dec 7 Heal — White Heal-all, White Spider

Dec 8 Mend — O Lord, Thou Pluckest Me Out

Dec 9 Focus — Pho  

Dec 10 Prepare — Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord

Dec 11 Messenger — Annunciation

Dec 12 Watch

Dec 13 Voice — The Voice of God

Dec 14 Wilderness

Dec 15 Trust — Trust, a Blessed Comfort

Dec 16 Among — Word Made Flesh

Dec 17 Light — Ooohhh, Pretty Little Baby

Dec 18 Dazzle — Dazzle-Eyes

Dec 19 Open — Open Wide (The Immaculate Conception)

Dec 20 Embrace — More than a Hug, or What Jesus Needed Most

Dec 21 Renew — Revolt

Dec 22 Greeting — Hello!

Dec 23 Child — Madonna and Child

Dec 24 Belief — Believe (Children Go Where I Send Thee)

Dec 25 Celebrate — Shout for Joy

Epilogue — The Birth of Mary (from the Infancy Gospel of James)

Reading Finnegan's Wake

What’s the best news this morning?
Somebody in Joyce says that, I’ll find out who.
Think of James Joyce, dictating
Finnegan’s Wake to Samuel Becket.
“Come in,” said Joyce to whomever was
at the door, and Becket wrote it down.

Joyce ended up liking “Come in,” so they kept it.
What a chuckle sandwich it must have been for them,
day after day! But now the only way to read Finnegan’s Wake
is to have it on your computer and do searches on it.
Even better: a Finnegan’s Wake concordance!
Of course, there are several on the internet.

I want to look up “Milton,” because he dictated
his works too. Bingo! I get—
Finnegan’s Wake lines: 1  Elucidations found: 2;
096.19 four of them, in Milton’s Park
under lovely Father Whisperer;
the elucidations being—

-096.10+ ing jackass.
Harick! Harick! The rose is white in the darick!;
-096.02+ And Sunfella’s nose
has got rhinocertitis from haunting the roes.
And now I’m on a dead-end page
titled Fweets of Fin (milton) with FW text.

I can click [Search Engine]
to go to the Search Engine Room.
Then I can search on the string, “milton”—
Finnegan’s Wake lines found: 42, including—
Her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching
for the fruit, she pluck’d, she eat.

Coded 052.25, and when I click, I get—
(shooting at empty stout bottles
Annie Oakley: American sharpshooter Nice!!!
So, without my typography, would you know whether “Nice!!!”
is part of Finnegan’s Wake, or just my interjection?
No you wouldn’t.

Three Poems Mostly About My Mother and My Sister Emily

Radical Surgery

                Before her final

cancer came to light, my mother took my sister Emily to the

                clinic several times
to have ear wax removed. Not long before my friend
                Dave got sick,
his wife Gerri underwent a preventative mastectomy, with a
                cruelly slow recovery.
When Dave became faint for no apparent reason,
                playing racquetball with
me at the Y, I had the front desk call 911.
                The paramedics came,
but found no sign of the expected heart attack.
                Gerri arrived and
drove Dave to the VA. As I watched them leave, Dave shouted,
                ”John, if we
never see each other again, I want you to know,
                I love you.”
By the next day, an MRI had detected an
                inoperable brain tumor.
I did see Dave again several times, played
                golf with him,
and during the final vigil held his hand for
                half an hour.
As for my mother, about a year before she died, the surgeon
                removed a grapefruit-
sized tumor from her chest (she must have lived
                with the knowledge
of that tumor for years before she finally went in).
                During my visit,
she gave me the job of digging out masses of
                root-bound iris
from an eight-by-twenty-four-foot flower bed. I worked
                for hours with
a garden spade, chopping out the putrid, pulpy tubers,
                slicing them small,
and heaving them into the compost –
                clumps of curly
tendrils, some harboring tiny clutches of writhing
                snow-white maggots

Summer in Gunnison

1.

                Summer in Gunnison,

Colorado – was it before my first grade year? –
                about the time
I began to know there was something wrong with my sister Emily –
                the dream in
which I watched her shrink and shrink
                down and down,
until she was a pirate stamp on the inside of a glass fish bowl.
                Approached by way
of Monarch Pass above timberline – bald rock landscape –
                banks of snow,
and snow falling, coating the road my father navigated,
                white-knuckled in
the blue Nash Rambler – my mother
                impatient – we kids
sensing our parents’ least emotion with our fine antennae

2.

                I don’t recall
a thing about the campus dorm apartment we lived in

                or my room.
I’m sure Emily did her usual trick of screaming for hours at
                night – I imagined,
lying with her mouth up against the crack of her bedroom door, deliberately to
                make the noise
as nerve-wracking as possible – it seemed to me that she screamed
                with an impish,
perverse intent, but I’m sure I realized how incapable she was of

                meaning any harm.
She lay screaming, completely oblivious of me or anyone

3.

                Gunnison was damp,                                         
smelling of pine, leaf rot, and mosquito fog –
                acrid mists drifting
down from the mountains in the late afternoons,
                prompting some to
call their kids indoors.
                Wide, sandy ditches
ran down each street – I guess to
                channel snow melt
in the early summer. Beside these ditches grew
                the biggest dandelions
I’ve ever seen. By joining
                their stems together
and sucking to start the flow, we could dry
                a small puddle,

draining it into another lower down. – I

4.

                remember little else,
except the climbing rope in the gymnasium, and some kind of running
                game with balls,
which I was hesitant to join at first, but in which I soon found myself
                completely enjoyably absorbed,
and our futile fishing forays on the Gunnison River

5.

                At the end
of the summer, my Evans cousins came and
                spent a week.
I think we left Gunnison with them, driving
                to Colorado Springs,
where we all went swimming in a big lake.
                I fell desperately
in love with my cousin Terry, who was two or three years older –
                tall, with auburn
hair – I remember her beige swimming suit and her
                thin, uncanny feet.
I longed to put my arms around her and kiss her face, as
                we rode together
in the back of my uncle’s green station wagon, and she
                read with me
the Golden Books story of Scuppers
                the Sailor Dog

Mama’s Death

                In the weeks
surrounding Mama’s death, I made several trips to Denver. It’s hard
                to remember now
what happened on which trip. My time was mostly taken
                up with business:
getting a bank to collect on years of social security and stock dividend
                checks that Mama
had thrown on the laundry room floor; trying to grasp the pieces of her
                not-unsubstantial estate;
getting the cats removed from the house when I realized Mama was afraid

                she might suffocate
if one of them sat on her chest and she couldn’t
                push him off

                The biggest concern
was to get Emily settled in a group home situation of some kind.

                Because her mother
was dying, Emily’s case was treated as urgent, and she soon moved
                to an establishment
called the Jewish Group Home, near Mama’s house. The only possible
                objection was Emily’s
devout Baptist faith, but I assured the director that my mother was
                not a Christian,
and that for Emily to enter the group home was
                Mama’s greatest wish

                One morning, when
Mary Catherine was in town, we got a call from Robin back in
                Minnesota. The hospice
had phoned there to let us know that Mama was doing poorly.
                When we called
back, the nurse told us (a little sheepishly) that Mama had already died.
                I suppose we
drove to the hospice to pick up whatever Mama had brought
                with her there.
Mama herself had arranged for the cremation long before,
                and her body
was already gone. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go, so Mary
                Catherine and I
organized a small memorial service. We both bought clothes
                for the occasion,
and we bought an outfit for Emily. Pastor Fredrick of Emily’s
                Galilee Baptist Church
conducted the ceremony. He seemed slightly embarrassed, or

                troubled – possibly because,
by his way of thinking, my poor mother was
                probably in Hell

                At the end
of my last visit while she was still in the house, Mama asked me to
                arrange that she

be moved to the hospice before I left. During the last evening, I
                think we finally
spent some meaningful time together. We listened to a Beethoven
                quartet on the
record player – not one of the late ones – I think it was the Opus 95
                in F minor.
Mama listened attentively, with obvious enjoyment (I remember
                her saying once
that she believed she had a musical gift, even though she never chose or
                had the opportunity
to sing or play). The next day, when it was almost time for my flight home, I
                called the ambulance
for Mama’s trip to the hospice. It arrived in a flash, before we
                were really ready.
I told Mama that she had been a good mother. She told me that I had been
                a good son

                The day before
she died, the three of us – Mary Catherine, Emily, and I – came to the hospice
                to visit Mama.
We didn’t know that this would be the last time we would ever see her.
                She was annoyed
that we had all  come at once – it seemed somehow
                wasteful to her.
As we were leaving, Emily said, “I love you, Mama,”
                and Mama said,
“I love you, Emily,” and then
                she was gone

Sublimation (Will You Miss Me?)

I walked through life in tighty-pants.
Never took my pecker out.
Well, what happened then?
Did you get converted?

          I found a sweet haven of sunshine at last.
          Will you miss me when I’m gone?

I met some cool cats.
Learned how to play country music. 
Bought a Magic Theater ticket.
Johanna was in it.

          I found a sweet haven of sunshine at last.
          Will you miss me when I’m gone?

The bookstore cats were in it too.
They had marvelous stamina for literature! 
Johanna was my fem-gendered self.
I loved her beyond measure.

          I found a sweet haven of sunshine at last.
          Will you miss me when I’m gone?

Johanna had another lover named Lucifer.
I was jealous, but she said keep it cosmic.
I still didn’t take my pecker out.
We were chaste as the heart of Beatrice.

          I found a sweet haven of sunshine at last
          Will you miss me when I’m gone?

Then Johanna had to go.
Worlds separated us, but the illusion lived.
Johanna’s a bright star in the firmament now,
a special magnet drawing my spaceship to her.

          I found a sweet haven of sunshine at last
          Will you miss me when I’m gone?

Angels on Pinterest

7 8 9 3 7 8 4

I woke up a lot last night
and really wanted to get up.
I feel like I have tendinitis
in my thumb—
much writing with a pencil
and playing my stringed intruments
with a plectrum.

There’s an angel image that
comes to mind—why can’t I find it?
The angels were playing big round lutes—
I’m thinking
of that Manet painting of
well-dressed lute-playing men with their
naked girlfriends.

But there’s another very
sexy image, a mixed-gender
lute-playing foursome—fleshy-chested
woman in
the foreground—fat, hovering
putti babies with cute testes
and penises.

Often the lutes are large—they
needed to be big to be loud.
So charming that the paintings often
portray jams
or rehearsals!—boy holding
cello, lutanist woman, eyes
under his wing.

Or just people practicing—
barefoot young red-haired girl or boy
looking intently at the fingers of
their left hand,
while their right testingly strums,
intent eyes showing: that angel
means business.

I’m no angel, but I played

my mandolin and fiddle
with friends last night—my bouzouki too—
Come on, boys
let’s go to hunting—and a
rooster crow, see-line, and she go
back home see-line.

Vielleicht

(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Apple corers—at least two with copper handles.
Small knives. Can openers.
A couple of objects that appear to be
some kind of metal clamp.
A great many tea strainers (aluminum?—no, tin).
Potato peelers. Graters.
What a lot of apple corers! (Poland today is Europe’s
largest producer of apples.)
A big pile of glasses cases.
Razor parts, hair clipper parts.
Keys, thermos bottles, coffee cups.
One big red bowl with a handle.
A really large quantity of tin tea strainers!

Small items, small enough
to be brought on board the wooden railroad cars
under a woman’s skirt.
Vielleicht, somewhere she would find some tea.
Vielleicht,  her captors, 
not, vielleicht, entirely
cruel after all, might give her some.
And, vielleicht, there would be a way to heat water,
or at worst the water would remain cold,
and she would pour the water
through the tea in the strainer,
vielleicht, into the tin cup,
and the remnants of her family would squat in a circle
and drink the tea together.
Or, vielleicht, somewhere on their journey she would find
an apple, carrot, or turnip,
and she would use the corer, the peeler,
and, vielleicht, the little knife
to prepare a modest meal.
Then she would put a bit of nourishing peeled apple
into the child’s mouth
as they rested together
on the floor of a house, vielleicht,
or, vielleicht, on the ground in the woods.

These few helpful implements she’d saved—
small items, small enough
to pack in her small cloth purse—only to learn
when she had reached her journey’s end
that she would not be allowed to keep even these.

Such small hopes—
so light
behind the dog-irons of history.

                                                                                                                                                                May-September, 2014

Shout for Joy

On this Christmas day,
we are given to wonder and amazement
as we contemplate
the days remaining.

It’s been decided
that the job creators need a tax break and
the job holders don’t.
The poor and abject

in our great cities
will be given little and then less, or else
lie by millions
in expensive prisons.

They have few options
besides crime. Inhabiting a machine designed
to eliminate
them, they slowly rot,

while we choose a few
to shine our light upon so that no one can
stop witnessing their
rich, beautiful lives.

God has given us
authority over nature, so we may
take whatever we
want and leave nothing.

Out of many, one
is now All for me—an undeserving few,
fattening on the
bodies of the rest.

It is being made
fair and lawful to steal from the poor and give
all they have to the
rich. And only when

every hard dollar,
every last drop of blood has been sucked from us
will they die at last,
their evil reign end.

What will then remain?
A wasted, abused world, bathed in excrement,
its jewels extracted,
its gold exhausted.

So what is there to
celebrate this Christmas day? The Christ child is
born again, away
in an oxe’s stall.

Herod heard the news
(Shout for joy!) He sent some soldiers (Shout for joy!)
but the soldiers couldn’t
find them (Shout for joy!)

‘cause they ran away
to Egypt (Shout for joy!) And there were angels
watching over them.
(Shout! Shout for the Lamb!

Shout for joy!) We’ll have
our Christmas today and we will be joyful,
even though it’s hard
to think we have long.

Poems for Advent 2017

Believe (Children, Go Where I Send Thee)

It is time to consider the grounds of belief.

OK, say that belief must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

By your leave.

Who said that?

Who wrote the wikipedia article? Belief is the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case with or without empirical evidence of factual certainty. (All real evidence must be empirical; revelation ain’t evidence.)

Two belief notions in ancient Greek thought:

pistis—trust-confidence—pistrusfidence

doxa—opinion-acceptance—doxeptance

Jonathan Leicester: belief has the purpose of guiding action rather than indicating truth. Who is this Jonathan Leicester guy?

Wittgenstein asked: If my friend says to me, “After I die there will be a judgement in which my soul is weighed,” and I say, “No, I don’t think there will be,” are we disagreeing?  My friend’s belief in a final judgement may count for their whole life.

Mostly, I’m scared of belief. I don’t want to be touched.

Here’s a synopsis of Pascal’s wager.

Pascal starts by thinking about infinity. We can’t understand its nature (it’s a number, but it’s neither even nor odd).

I may blame the religious for their belief in an Infinite Providence for which they have no evidence, and which they cannot even imagine. But Pascal says, do not condemn as wrong those who have made a choice, for you know nothing about it. But you can blame them for not remaining agnostic. But Pascal says, No, you must choose: You are already committed.

There is an infinity of infinitely happy life to be won, one chance of winning against a finite number of chances of losing, and what you are staking is finite—or is it?—your life.

It has to come down to desire. How can you not WANT there to be an infinitely loving presence?

blind confidence of an iddy-biddy baby

wrapped in swaddling clothing

lying in a manger

mother’s presence filling all space

her never-failing care.

So there’s no choice after all, no room for hesitation.

You must give everything.

Poems for Advent 2017

Madona and Child (Robert Southwell, "The Burning Babe")

The babe, the burning babe.
What does the baby have other
than the mother?

The babe in arms, the burning babe.
A baby never comes
without its mother.

But there’s no mother
in “The Burning Babe”—
Surprised I was with sudden heat,

Which made my heart to glow. . . .
A pretty babe all buring bright
Did in the air appear.

The babe is crying as it burns—
Such floods of tears did shed,
As though its flood should quench its flames—

It’s as if the babe is in some kind of hell,
or is itself hell—
My faultless breast the furnace is—

The babe’s heart is hell,
but Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke,
The ashes shames and scorns.—

A crying baby without a mother.
What a hot potato
that baby is!

Not the usual babe-in-the-manger image.
The babe in a manger wakes to the cattle lowing
but makes no crying.

I love thee, Lord Jesus, look down from the sky
And stay by my cradle til morning is nigh.
That baby

is happy and quiet in its mother’s sight.

In the mother’s sight.
The baby IS the mother in that song.

Poems for Advent 2017

Hello! (Catullus, 101)

I don't know why you say Goodbye, I say Hello. Paul McCartney

Ave atque vale.
You greet me,
you say farewell.
How poignant is that?—
a grief sandwich!

I greet you at the threshold of a brilliant career!—
Emerson to Whitman.
That would have sounded different
if he’d said edge—I greet you at the
edge of a brilliant career.

Doomed
to be a star!—
Calvin Griffith
greeting
Jim Eisenreich.

But there’s a typo in adventword.org.
Today’s Avent word (Dec 22)
is Getting.—Damn, I looked at a related page yesterday
and I thought I saw Greeting.
So now is all my Greeting homework invalid?

No, just a typo:
adventword.org/greeting says
22 December 2017—As part of the Holy Baptism celebration
the community enthusiastically greets the newest member
of Christ’s family.

When I get up there and settle down
And I step inside those gates and look around,
I’ll want at least a million years to view the throne,
So many friends I’ll want to greet
when I get home!

But I want to give Catullus
the last word,
with his pagan Fortune goddess.
He doesn’t believe in heaven
or even karma.

That’s the beauty of the Roman
attitude toward death, the stoicism
that lets me slash through my guts
and spread my entrails
all over the forum. Hello!

Through many nations and over many seas I’ve arrived

for your sad funeral rites, brother,

to give you the final gift of death

and vainly address your ashes

since it be that fortune has removed from me yourself,

Oh, poor unhappy brother, snatched from me!

Now, however, so that ancestral precedent and custom 

may be fulfilled, as a sad funeral gift,

accept a brother’s bitterly flowing tears,

and, here, in perpetuum, brother, Greetings! and Goodbye.

Poems for Advent 2017

Early Crossroads

My mother’s rage was my name for fear
when I would come in from the back yard
with a caterpillar in my hair.
But it was my father not me she 
hated. I won the Oedipal war
without a fight, and possessed my stern
Jocasta without guilt, without cause 
to stab my eyes dark with her brooch pins. 

What could be so terrifying as
a victory so clear? Boney in
the Kremlin, pacing. No one arriving
to sign his treaties. Only villains
and whores still at large in the city.
And now the great houses start burning.

Revolt (What I Typed on a Facebook Thread Yesterday)

“I was brought up without God.
Atheism is the most natural point of view for me.
The God assumption isn't the least bit plausible to me.

There is a God if it's useful for us that there be.”

—What did I mean by “useful, ” I wonder?
—I think I just meant that there can be a God if we want there to be.

Jesus, won’t you come by here
Jesus, won’t you come by here
Jesus, won’t you come by here

The usual view is that God is a Higher Power, external to us.
God created us, and is waiting somewhere we don’t know where
to see what we will do.

But He already knows, of course—

knew from the very first moment of creation
whether I would be saved or not.

Now is the needed time
Now is the needed time
Now is the needed time

But what is God, or what can God be for me—for us?
God is the everyday excitement of my life.
God is the emotion, the gladness, the inspiration,

the spark I feel in my heart for another.

No need to call this stuff by the name God,
but not a bad thing to have a Name for it either.

Jesus, won’t you answer prayer
Jesus, won’t you answer prayer
Jesus, won’t you answer prayer

Adam walked in Eden, naming everything.
God was there too, walking in the cool of the day.
When Adam was naming the animals, did he name God too?

But God wanted to test us—it’s the oldest story,

so He told us not to eat the apple.
The “Great Forbidder,” Satan called him.

Daniel in the lion’s den
Daniel in the lion’s den
Daniel in the lion’s den

So we ate the apple, of course. When somebody tells you
not to do something, sooner or later you’re going to do it,
like a child being told, “Don’t spill the salt.”

Then we had to be banished from Paradise,

and women would now have to bear their children in pain,
and have an eternal enmity toward snakes.

The angel locked the lion’s jaw
The angel locked the lion’s jaw
The angel locked the lion’s jaw

It’s easy to be cynical about Christianity—
all we have inherited from our ancestors’ understanding
of their spiritual situation,

but I’ve gotten to the place

where I can’t remember any more
why I felt I needed to reject it.

I’m down on my knees and prayin’
I'm down on my knees and prayin’
I’m down on my knees and prayin'

Saying, Lord, have mercy on me
Lord, have mercy on me
Lord, have mercy on me
                                                on me

Poems for Advent 2017

More Than a Hug, or What Jesus Needed Most (Ecclesiastes 3:5)

Mary’s EMBRACE of her Son in Michelangelo’s Pieta is cold marble but living, warm and true. Mary was giving Jesus what he needed most. As Advent people, we encounter people every day who need more than a hug or a handshake at the Peace in Church. EMBRACE a beloved child of God. Virgina Theological Seminary.

I wonder if someone at the Virgina Theological Seminary
will point out that Jesus in the Pieta is dead. Too late for hugs.

A time to embrace and a time to refrain
(it may be too late) from embracing.

But it’s also not proper to embrace during menstruation,
but when did that ever stop us in our raunchy, randy days?

But this rule no longer needs to be obeyed,
now that Jesus has freed us from the Law.

Before Jesus, people were originally sinful;
only by obeying the Law could they not be bad.

But Jesus’s blood has now redeemed us;
we can be good by following our hearts.

So, in that case, why can’t we have free sexual pleasure
at will? The answer is, we constrain ourselves

for the sake of a sublimated pleasure that is greater
and more sustainable than physical pleasure.

Our embraces must be chaste
with those beloved with whom we most closely collaborate.

Poems for Advent 2017

Essay on Suicide

The summer I was fourteen going into the ninth grade, I worked as janitor and ticket cashier in a bar-melodrama venue in Buckskin Joe, Colorado.

Buckskin Joe is a fake gold-mining ghost town a few miles west of Canyon City, in the mountains, near Royal Gorge. 

I got the job because the kid who had it before me had told everyone he had to leave, no one knew why.

It turned out he left because he was planning to commit suicide. 

He trained me in over a few evenings in his last week.

The news that he had killed himself was a shock, even though I hadn't liked him much—he seemed coldly arrogant and fastidious. 

I’m sure that this was partly a self-defensive impulse on my part, but when people would talk about the “tragedy” of the loss (and I could see how devastating it was for his mom and brother, who immediately left the production), my strong reaction was that, in the broadest sense, there had been no loss at all.

The kid’s life was not less valuable for the fact that he had not lived to adulthood. And there was nothing further he could have gained in life that would have remained to him, anyhow.

This feeling has stayed with me to this day.

And it is a joyful feeling, too—a conviction of the unique and equal value of every life. The kid was himself, and that fact can never change, whatever his pain and maladaptation. (It was easy or me to feel this way, of course. I did not love him, and thus did not have the labor of re-assimilating the parts of myself that I had lost in him.)

Not long ago, I had a conversation about suicide with my younger daughter. 

I said the only way I could survive the devastation would be to respect and accept the decision—scary, because it almost seemed like permission—but I as father have no power to forbid or permit such a thing.

As it turned out, I not only got the kid’s cashier job, but his brother’s role in the play as well.

I remember, I was talking about the suicide backstage with a high school girl from Canyon City I flirted with. She asked me if I would ever kill myself.

“Yes,” I said.

But (just me) 

I’m pretty sure I never would.

Open Wide (The Immaculate Conception)

(Luke, I:26-35; David Bowie, “Golden Years”; Sonnets to Orpheus, Second Series, Sonnet 5)

1.

In the Book of Luke,
Gabriel visits Mary:
Blessed are you among women,
for you shall conceive in your womb,
and bring forth God!
Mary wonders: How can this be,
seeing I know not a man?—
meekly inquiring—and receives
the clear word:
The Holy Ghost shall come upon you,
and the power of the Highest
shall overshadow you.
Mary answers:
See the handmaid
of the Lord.

2.

We can have open season on elk.
We can have a spiritual opening like a Quaker.
We can open our hearts and minds.

“Open, Sesame!” we say,
and a door in the rock opens,
unless we forget the shibboleth—

“Open, Grape Seed!”
“Open, Poppy Seed!”
“Open, Carroway Seed!”

Linseed, flax, you name it!
We can keep our back door open
in our golden years.

Don't let me hear you say life's taking you nowhere, angel

Golden years wop wop wop
Come get up my baby

Look at that sky, life's begun
Nights are warm and the days are young

Golden years wop wop wop
Come get up my baby

Some of these days, and it won't be long
Gonna drive back down where you once belonged
In the back of a dream car twenty foot long
Don't cry my sweet, don't break my heart
Doing all right, but you gotta get smart
Wish upon, wish upon, day upon day,
I believe, Oh Lord, I believe all the way.

Golden years wop wop wop
Come get up my baby

Run for the shadows, run for the shadows

Run for the shadows in these golden years
Wop wop wop

And, hell, this smarmy Rilke sonnet is clearly about conception,
immaculate or not:

3.

Flower-muscle, anemone,
gradually opening in the meadow morning,
as into you the many-toned
light of the bright heavens is poured,

into that tense but quiet muscle
of infinite reception
sometimes so completely overpowered
that the resting posture of the downfall

hardly allows the hinged
petals to spring back and cover you:
you, decision and power of how many worlds!

We, violent ones, we weather longer.

But when—in which of all our lives—
have we ever been so open and receptive?

Poems for Advent 2017

Dazzle Eyes (Infancy Gospel of James)

When you look up the word “dazzle,” you find
it means a kind of blindness.
You are drawn to the light,
you want to become one with the light,
but the light blinds you.

Her eyes looking into mine dazzled me,
and I had to look away.
They were a brightness
that at its center seemed
an eclipse.

How annoying for my potential lovers
that I could never look at them!
It’s a mixed bag for the woman
who must lead this dazzled male
through traffic.

The eyes are push-me-pull-you organs,
able to convey and gauge the finest nuance,
or to turn black like drawn window shades.
And sometimes I’m a worm
between two robins’ beaks.

The stars dazzle, but mostly in the sense
that the Universe, with its galaxies,
its supernovae,
its dire black hole objects,
makes no moral sense at all.

And it's clear
that when God the Light does appear,
no one can see Them. Humankind cannot bear
very much reality, says You Know Who.
But they stood in the place of the cave.

And lo, a bright cloud overshadowing the cave.
And the midwife said: My soul is magnified this day,
for salvation is born unto Israel.
And immediately the cloud
withdrew itself out of the cave,

and a great light appeared in the cave, 

so that our eyes could not endure it.
And little by little, that light withdrew itself,
until the young child appeared:
and it went and took the breast of its mother Mary.

Poems for Advent 2017

Ooohhh, Pretty Little Baby (John I:4)

In him was the life; and the life was the light of men

Light in the east—
Three Wise Men?—
The Sun, of course.

Why do we have these ridiculous Wise Men, anyway?
Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar.
Caspar was an old deaf king.

I suppose the Kings were to signify
the universality of the world’s
accepance of Jesus.

Black Balthazar,
worshipping the Christ Child
in his minstrel-show getup.

The problem is, Jesus gets all twisted—
Platonized in the first place with all that
In the beginning was the Word stuff

(Word, indeed—what word?
And the light shone in the darkness,
and the darkness comprehended it not),

and in the second place installed
as a blood-sacrifice substitute
into a world-domination regime

in which my own country is a principle player,
sending fighter planes in the shape of crosses
against the Paynim hordes.

But the little boy Amahl is restored his feet,
after the startling Thief, thief! scene—
Good woman, you can keep the gold.

The Littlest Angel gives their little box from
under their bed at home,
containing objects of no value, to the Holy Child.

The Little Drummer Boy drums
pa rum pum pum pum.
Christina Rossetti gives my heart.

So much candid generosity in the world!

So many willing to offer their crutch
to the little baby come to be the light of the world.

Poems for Advent 2017