More on: Christmas

And so, emboldened by what the angel told them, / off they went toward Bethlehem to find / the swaddled babe and manger and lolling beasts, / their beauty and their beings ramified / in carols lightening our lamentations

I hear these words in your voice no matter who says them, in the well-water smell of the basement, by the artificial tree you and she would one day put a sheet over, so you never had to take it down or put it up again.

They wished they could take their friends with them when they moved. It wasn’t far, trading one small town for another, not even a hundred miles across the state line. A point of pride to keep in touch, long distance calls on Sundays after supper, person-to-person for Carleen to catch them up on the local…

The stab to the heart that is such music, the light beyond brightness that is such sight— For the sake of this season in the stories I will cease my wars with God tonight. I will choose, with open eye, the talking beasts, the white-in-the-snowdrift Christmas rose, the legends of wandering a bitter way, high…

He is, I think, his own angel, or mine, not winged or gifted with a voice of annunciation— Blessed are you of all—or wielding a double-edged sword cleaving evil from the earth’s right angles, but rather a shuffle, stooped and soft-featured as the light from our campus lampposts, their globes a quiet amber behind beveled…

On an island in the disputed region of the Yellow Sea, blooms of smoke from the shelling of the garrison weave into one bloom, one force of nature so thick, they say, you cannot see your hands. The planet, we know, tilts on its axis like a man contemplating a problem, spun toward the horizon…

for my father Having pictured the soul as a kind of private moon that hovered invisibly above a person’s shoulder, when my mother said a man and woman’s love for one another could bring their child’s soul down from heaven to be born, I saw it as a cloud-like orb slipping down from the vicinity…

Balthazar KING Balthazar loved the freshness of his gardens and smiled to see the reflection of his ebony face in the clear water of the tanks. And he loved the joyfulness, the commotion, and the abundance of banquets, and often his parties lasted till daybreak. However, late one night, after all the guests had withdrawn,…

Sure, I’d had too much wine and not enough of the Advent hope that candles are lit for; and I’ll confess up front, I was without charity for our guest who, glassed in behind those black, small, rectangular frames, reminded me of those poems that coldly arrange a puzzle of non sequiturs to prove again…

Out the window, the parking lot and beyond that, the highway. No doubt something important began or ended precisely there, or there, in that spot where the ice-white rental car is idling neatly, clouds of exhaust billowing up like hope, like the hope of the Christ child, silent in his mother’s arms, finally silent after…