To: You From: Me

I've got a few different things I'd like to share, so forgive the rambling disjointedness of this post. 


First, I literally cannot believe I forgot to use this poem yesterday! All year long I knew THIS would be the one for Christmas Eve. Tempus fugit, man, and it never fugits our way. So fine: here's a belated Christmas Eve poem followed by some for Christmas Day. 

December 24, and George McBride is Dead

Richard Hugo

You a gentleman and I up from the grime--
now wind has shut your dark, dark eyes
and I am left to hate this Christmas eve.
Christ, they're playing carols. Some crap
never stops. You're dead and I'm without
one goddamn Wagner record in the house
to play you up to what for some must be
behind the sky with solid orchestration.


Rest in your defeat, you stupid jerk,
so fat your heart gave out, so sweet
you couldn't help but hear the punks.
"One gulp. The whole quart, Mac." That town
you died in--so unlikely--vineyards,
sunny valleys, stark white missions
and the pale priest summoning
brown sinners from the olive grove.
I'll not know your grave, though I believe
our minds have music that can lead us
through the tangle to the lost stone of a friend.


I get along, write my poems. Essentially
a phony, I try my feelings now
and know I fail. George, it's Christmas eve
and bells are caroling. I'm in the kitchen,
fat and writing, drinking beer and shaking.




Man, where to start? There are images that whip past you at the speed of Willie Wonka's ferry ride, but there's unity in it all, too. There's tough-guy bravado and painful sentiment, sometimes in the same line. I'm not sure if the poem is for George McBride, an old-time major-league baseball player with the lowest batting average on record (.218). It hardly matters - like Bukowski's "For Jane," this thing devastates anything in its path.


And now for something completely different: 

The Mystic's Christmas  

John Greenleaf Whittier

"All hail!" the bells of Christmas rang,
"All hail!" the monks at Christmas sang,
The merry monks who kept with cheer
The gladdest day of all their year.


But still apart, unmoved thereat,
A pious elder brother sat
Silent, in his accustomed place,
With God's sweet peace upon his face.


"Why sitt'st thou thus?" his brethren cried,
"It is the blessed Christmas-tide;
The Christmas lights are all aglow,
The sacred lilies bud and blow.


"Above our heads the joy-bells ring,
Without the happy children sing,
And all God's creatures hail the morn
On which the holy Christ was born.


"Rejoice with us; no more rebuke
Our gladness with thy quiet look."
The gray monk answered, "Keep, I pray,
Even as ye list, the Lord's birthday.


"Let heathen Yule fires flicker red
Where thronged refectory feasts are spread;
With mystery-play and masque and mime
And wait-songs speed the holy time!


"The blindest faith may haply save;
The Lord accepts the things we have;
And reverence, howsoe'er it strays,
May find at last the shining ways.


"They needs must grope who cannot see,
The blade before the ear must be;
As ye are feeling I have felt,
And where ye dwell I too have dwelt.


"But now, beyond the things of sense,
Beyond occasions and events,
I know, through God's exceeding grace,
Release from form and time and space.


"I listen, from no mortal tongue,
To hear the song the angels sung;
And wait within myself to know
The Christmas lilies bud and blow.


"The outward symbols disappear
From him whose inward sight is clear;
And small must be the choice of days
To him who fills them all with praise!


"Keep while you need it, brothers mine,
With honest seal your Christmas sign,
But judge not him who every morn
Feels in his heart the Lord Christ born!"




I'm not usually a fan of Whittier - he can be too pat and sing-songy, like many in that first crop of true American poets. I like this one anyway, with its little moral at the end.


But I think this poem expresses my deepest Christmas wish: 

Christ Climbed Down

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no gold Christmas trees
and no black Christmas trees
and no powderblue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck creches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey


Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagon sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
with German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody's imagined Christ child
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby carollers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
thru a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30
with Midnight Mass matinees
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary's womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody's anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings




I'm hoping not just for an end to the panicky pageantry and ludicrous waste, the greed and lethargy and vanity and gluttony, the elevation of a cute baby God above a real God. I'm hoping for that "very craziest of Second Comings."


Dave Bazan writes:




I place in the manger
Baby Jesus figurine
Sipping Christmas whiskey
Wondering if I still believe.




It's an excellent question I'm still in the process of answering, in the darkest night of my anonymous soul. Nativity gives me a place where he can await again and maybe tip the scales.





So Merry Christmas, this crazy mixed-up holiday that's middle ground between Christians and nature-worshippers, between greed and generosity, joy and sadness, family companionship and deep winter solitude. Let there be peace on earth and goodwill towards men.


And if we can't have that, I'll settle for Wil Wheaton's renowned motto:

Stocking Stuffers

Just some fun Christmas Eve tidbits for you! First of all, one of my all-time favorite Christmas songs ever:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
A Colbert Christmas: Colbert/Costello Duet
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog March to Keep Fear Alive

And of course, a long-ish Christmas poem that is — fortunately — not "The Night Before Christmas."

Christmas Eve in Whitneyville

Donald Hall

December, and the closing of the year;
The momentary carolers complete
Their Christmas Eves, and quickly disappear
Into their houses on each lighted street.


Each car is put away in each garage;
Each husband home from work, to celebrate,
Has closed his house around him like a cage,
And wedged the tree until the tree stood straight.


Tonight you lie in Whitneyville again,
Near where you lived, and near the woods or farms
Which Eli Whitney settled with the men
Who worked at mass-producing firearms.


The main street, which was nothing after all
Except a school, a stable, and two stores,
Was improvised and individual,
Picking its way alone, among the wars.


Now Whitneyville is like the other places,
Ranch houses stretching flat beyond the square,
Same stores and movie, same composite faces
Speaking the language of the public air.


Old houses of brown shingle still surround
This graveyard where you wept when you were ten
And helped to set a coffin in the ground.
You left a friend from school behind you then,


And now return, a man of fifty-two.
Talk to the boy. Tell him about the years
When Whitneyville quadrupled, and how you
And all his friends went on to make careers,


Had cars as long as hayricks, boarded planes
For Rome and Paris where the pace was slow,
And took the time to think how yearly gains,
Profit and volume made the business grow.


“The things you had to miss,” you said last week,
“Or thought you had to, take your breath away.”
You propped yourself on pillows, where your cheek
Was hollow, stubbled lightly with new gray.


This love is jail; another sets us free.
Tonight the houses and their noise distort
The thin rewards of solidarity.
The houses lean together for support.


The noises fail, and lights go on upstairs.
The men and women are undressing now
To go to sleep. They put their clothes on chairs
To take them up again. I think of how,


All over Whitneyville, when midnight comes
They lie together and are quieted,
To sleep as children sleep, who suck their thumbs,
Cramped in the narrow rumple of each bed.


They will not have unpleasant thoughts tonight.
They make their houses jails, and they will take
No risk of freedom for the appetite,
Or knowledge of it, when they are awake.


The lights go out and it is Christmas Day.
The stones are white, the grass it black and deep.
I will go back and leave you here to stay
Where the dark houses harden into sleep.

From Each According to His Excesses...

And just because I feel like a little more ranting about work might be appropriate, here ya go!

What Work Is

Philip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to   
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,   
just because you don’t know what work is.

Workers of the World Unite!
or
Dyslexics of the World Untie!
or
Hipster T-Shirt Manufacturers of the World Something Witty!

Suck Is Relative

Especially around Christmas, working in retail at a high-end technology company sucks. Folks feel entitled because they're big-ticket items. There's enough misplaced anger to fill three therapist couches. And people get aggravated at all the people here to do the exact same thing they themselves are here doing. 


You have to imagine even little baby Jesus (no crying he makes) might bind some cords and kick a few money-changers out of the mall.


So it's nice to have a reminder that 21st-century first-world suck is honeyed heaven compared to most work, even work in this country. And at least I've got a job, nothing to sneeze at when we came this close to a "Brother can you spare some garbage to boil into a stew?" type situation. 

Work Song

Joshua Mehigan

This fastening, unfastening, and heaving—
this is our life. Whose life is it improving?
It topples some. Some others it will toughen.
Work is the safest way to fail, and often
the simplest way to love a son or daughter.
We come. We carp. We’re fired. We worry later.


That man is strange. His calipers are shiny.
His hands are black. For lunch he brings baloney,
and, offered coffee, answers, “Thank you, no.”
That man, with nothing evil left to do
and two small skills to stir some interest up,
fits in the curtained corner of a shop.


The best part of our life is disappearing
into the john to sneak a smoke, or staring
at screaming non-stop mills, our eyes unfocused,
or standing judging whose sick joke is sickest.
Yet nothing you could do could break our silence.
We are a check. Do not expect a balance.


That is a wrathful man becoming older,
a nobody like us, turned mortgage holder.
We stay until the bell. That man will stay
ten minutes more, so no one can complain.
Each day, by then, he’s done exactly ten.
Ten what, exactly, no one here can say.

Hiding Places

Secret Places

Matt Quarterman

You stumble upon them without trying
to find where they are.
There is no code to break or signal to find.
They are often out of the way.
Usually you must go in daylight,
when the weather is not bad.
You must go alone.
There are rules for these things, you know.
They might be a wall on a walkway,
shrouded by trees.
They might be a low-hanging branch
near a man-sized fence.
They might be a seat of stone.
They are sacred because you find them to be
and because you make them so.
You must walk there, because in a pilgrimage
the journey is most of the point.
You cannot go too often.
You must need it.
Be prepared to bring something to leave,
an offering to prove you were there.
It can be small, something you burn or inscribe.
Observe the details closely, or you leave with nothing.
Then pick among the pieces, the scattered bones,
the tender inner parts, the sticks and stones
dropped with portents on the ground.
The meaning will come to you.

I wrote this on a walk, which is where I seem to write most of what I do. I started to think about solitude, about purposefully being alone. And it seemed like a powerful thing.

I've always found places to be by myself, even before I was old enough for school. And I think this poem helped me wrestle with why. Every creative person I know needs to be alone some of the time. Why? A need for focus and concentration? Freedom to fail? A spiritual practice? I'm sure there's room for combinations and more alternatives I haven't thought of.

But there's something living and necessary about being by yourself. It's not a physical state: I'm a big-city kid, I can be alone anyplace. To me there's an element of otherness, of distance from your surroundings that lets you look without having to be a part of things.

Maybe it's because I spent most of my early life in cultures that weren't mine and languages I didn't speak. I got to choose what I wanted, what I would or wouldn't accept from the culture. I wasn't indoctrinated, I had a certain remove that would give me perspective.

In Lisbon or Odessa, everything had a veil of mystery, everything seemed like it had a secret. That wasn't just a cornice of a building: some unknown person had thought it up, designed it, made it in a time and place I didn't really know. There was a shimmer around the edges of everything, a feeling that there was some hidden knowledge you might possess if you opened yourself.

I've been in the States more than a third of my life now, and it can get harder to keep that vision. It's much easier to take things for granted. Things become familiar, you assume you know more than you do. What you can't guess you can write off as unimportant. (In my case at least, contempt also breeds familiarity.)

You have to cultivate a sense of the hidden-ness of things or it gets lost. I try to work on that now, the ability to remove yourself from the surroundings without judgment.

So don't get me wrong: I like you guys. We have good times.

But I want to be alone.

Why Tidal Pull Makes Me Nervous

You can also hear this one, she delivers a really interesting interpretation of the poem. And there is some harsh language but not without purpose.

Facts About the Moon

Dorianne Laux

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen
for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only love, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters, and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.




I hear that - learning this fact freaked me out, too. (By the way, the article is an amazing read.) The earth is not round, there are tidal bulges that affect its gravitational pull. Tidal friction, difference between the earth's and moon's rotation affect it, too. Tides are also why the same side of the moon always faces us.


Oh, and this: "One hundred years from now, the day will be 2 milliseconds longer than it is now." 


Are you KIDDING me?! The DAYS are literally getting LONGER?! 

Doesn't anything stay the same? All these solid things, these things we take for granted, can go away?


A loved one can lose a limb. Someone is asked to pack up their things. The cough won't go away, gets worse. And the moon will eventually pull away, the earth will stop rotating, the magnet at the middle of the world will lose its charge.


How do we face the day with all of these things hanging over us? The question isn't rhetorical for me, I think it's more ontological. How can things be as they are, and we be as we are knowing them? 


These are the things that make it hard to sleep: it's not just my application could get rejected, I'm late for work, I forgot to run the errand. One day there won't be a moon. One day there won't be tides. One day there won't be me. 


I could use a drink.

Shop Till You Drop Till You Shop

I've really come to love Tony Hoagland's poetry. It's ironic and funny without losing sincerity or depth. He has a way to laugh that makes you wince at the candor.


And if there's a more apropos piece of writing for 24-Hour News Cycle mid-Recession Christmas, I haven't seen it yet.

As a friend once said, "It's like Christmas threw up
all over the department store!"

At the Galleria Shopping Mall
Tony Hoagland

Just past the bin of pastel baby socks and underwear,
there are some 49-dollar Chinese-made TVs;


one of them singing news about a far-off war,
one comparing the breast size of an actress from Hollywood


to the breast size of an actress from Bollywood.
And here is my niece Lucinda,


who is nine and a true daughter of Texas,
who has developed the flounce of a pedigreed blonde


and declares that her favorite sport is shopping.
Today is the day she embarks upon her journey,


swinging a credit card like a scythe
through the meadows of golden merchandise.


Today is the day she stops looking at faces,
and starts assessing the labels of purses;


So let it begin. Let her be dipped in the dazzling bounty
and raised and wrung out again and again.


And let us watch.
As the gods in olden stories


turned mortals into laurel trees and crows
                   to teach them some kind of lesson,


so we were turned into Americans
to learn something about loneliness.