Tag Archives: christmas

The fifth tree

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The fifth tree

The dog’s name was Frederick.
On Christmas day he breathed his last

Short breath, four years ago this Christmas
And I lifted him, knowing his lightness

And his heaviness and buried him beside
The shed and placed a rough stone jagged

Edge up in the troubled dark ground. All the dog
Ever did was add a troubled edge to the day

Of anyone coming near his family. Swedish
Vallhund, short brown hair, long white teeth

Beneath black lips, he bit half a dozen neighbors
Across three neighborhoods and all forgave him

For whatever reason anyone forgives anything.
Every year here, the day after Thanksgiving, it’s raining.

The raining, present Friday, always the same.
My family and I pick out a Douglas fir for our Christmas tree

From the yard of a church a few minutes up the road.
The trees lean against a makeshift wall like middle

schoolers at their first Friday night dance. And we pick
One like one of them might be picked just before

The last song. And we dress the dying thing and
Give it water and when the solstice passes and

Christmas passes and New Year’s passes we take
It down and I drag it respectfully through the yard and

Lay it behind the shed and let it do what dead trees do.
Reminders to me, of what I am not sure, but I prefer

These trees where they are to things picked up from curbs
And tossed into a truck’s crushing metal ending.

On Christmas day the fifth tree shines inside and as
The afternoon warms I pay my respect to the previous

Douglas firs, and to the spirit of the dog who never saw
A stranger’s leg he didn’t want to bite. Hard to think

The second tree, the third, the fourth, came after Frederick
was already in the ground, with a fifth soon to join it. Some day

I’ll stop the family tradition or my children will, with respect
To these trees, and the dog who keeps them company,

To the fierce desire with which the dead serve the living.

Eulogy for your fathers

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Eulogy for your fathers

When the time comes, you will
Not need the words. Whether

He was someone whose love
Shone softly like a lamp on a piano

Or like the highbeams of a car
Arriving just in time. Whether his deeds

Went unnoticed by anyone but you,
Whether he cared for nobody but you,

Defended you until death or until
your first step into your own perilous

Maturity, I have the words for you.
Tell the others to remember how

From a man he grew into a father and that
Though from father he fell into a featureless

Future, dying as a shadow of himself
that he first was someone light itself

Had to bend around. Tell them you
Don’t need the words. You had a father.

Sestina, with Christmas Lights [from Vanishing Tracks]

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Sestina, with Christmas Lights [from Vanishing Tracks]

Through the graves of trees comes a quiet that is almost conscious.
A memory in search of its strength, like blood racing to the heart
To be replenished with oxygen. In that quiet is our quick
Reinvention, and we have forgotten already who we were, what our stories
Were about, in the way that the clump of unplugged Christmas lights
Has nothing to do with Christmas. I had a similar feeling in a hotel

Once, where I did not recognize my story as being set in a hotel
But there I was. I was home in a way I was not even conscious
Of acknowledging, as Christmas is not acknowledged by Christmas lights
But by acknowledging the birth of something brand new in our hearts
That just might save us if we can forget all the stories
That have come before it, if our sense of eternity’s quick

Enough to follow tracks time’s flurries are so quick
To fill. It’s too cold outside: back to memory’s mansion or is it a hotel
Of the same room comfortably over and over, the same stories
In generic bedrooms we’re nearly content in without us being conscious
Of not having slept there before? The past is leading my heart
To a place the past cannot be, but like one short in Christmas lights

May darken an entire string, most of which would still light if the Christmas lights
Were wired differently. But we can’t change the way we’re wired or how quick
Darkness in one triggers a darkness in many. Right now your heart
Just pumped a liter of blood in one beat, like checkout time at a hotel
Where everybody knows they’re coming back but are conscious
They will get a different room that will be familiar as the stories

They grew up with are different from the stories
They tell. And still nobody has invented better Christmas lights.
When I speak to my mother about Christmas she is no longer conscious
Of memory as memory, it is the tree her speech lands on like the quick
Accumulation of snow on branches. It is like she is wandering in a hotel
Where her key opens every door and every room touches her heart

Though she’s no longer talking about Christmas. I don’t have the heart
To correct her, or maybe I have heart enough to know her stories
Are closer to being correct, they’re all there in the same hotel
Like a convention of amnesiacs, and either the Christmas lights
Are lit or they are not, but their keys fit all the doors now, and quick
As a wink there’s a mint beside the bed of all that is conscious.

Boxing up ornaments and taking down the tree, the family was suddenly conscious
Of disconcerted movement: two weeks in warmth, and hatched hungry to the quick,
Hundreds of praying mantis glittered like unexpected Christmas lights.