glass, highlighted, deep
as winter cold, shining soft
as vision's Christmas festival.
To describe this house, the straight-
nailed angles, minimal but important
molding, all that pain that holds
memories together — to describe this dream
only because it is more painful than
living — wine, butter, flowers; to enunciate
once again the pain of hammers
driving home connecting spars;
building a house where experience
changes as often as returning, finding
the same dry smell, the prickling cold;
to describe wrenching and remorse,
the misdirected nail, is nothing,
is poison or physic, taken daily
or in homecomings — is nothing
where the powdering fern and the dimmed-
as-heaven blue transparency
say to eyes, say to the house, say
to the owner of pain-construction,
why have you not seen? Was it
too hard? too hard to love?
how did you find me?
And, in the manger seen through
blue glass, dim forms, faraway
lands of a smaller dream,
perfected and unreachable save by
this moment's light, shepherds ask,
have we seen? we bring something to a star,
something to the only miracle our world
was prepared for, we bring gifts
because we heard an angel, and one doesn't
see angels much in these parts. Besides,
the crops were good this year — why not
take something along in thanks for the vision,
at least.
And in the manger
a child through a clouded window
sees ferns, solid and bending, against the blue.
Do we have clearer eyes, seeing
Before any celebration or birth, far lands,
gifts? Or is it only that in this house,
in the cowshed, in the shepherd's hut, some
musical mysterious home-light silvers
the bright and awful dream of day to day?