23rd & 24th December, 2004
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Rod in “The Best is Yet to Come” 11/6/04
Photo by Shira Greenburg ©2004 by Broadway.com. Used by Permission
A Thought for Today
Life is too short not to believe in Santa
Clause.
FROM the¨BOOKS
TWO POEMS from SUSPENSION BRIDGE
Fun at the Fair / for Aram Saroyan
The night’s an attic
to the bedroom earth.
To know our worth we need
the hike upstairs
and to the basement, too.
What comes and goes
on stairways, stairwells?
Only life.
Those who will not take the time
to traverse, trip, trot on
will miss not just the eagle
but the eagle’s song.
So swift a piece of life,
so slight a thing
we are today, tomorrow,
not what tomorrow brings.
The poet stumbles, gets up
runs to find his catch up time–
he is the mystic warrior
in the underbrush.
The general dies a martyr,
and poet dies a pauper
and in-between the in-betweens
are led off to the slaughter.
All life is after life
and we are marking time,
while time, that rural enemy,
has marks on each of us
(birth and brand).
The fortuneteller’s lifeline
the gimmick drawn on every hand.
Ah, but there is fun
not merely melancholy
to be found at every fair
a hopscotch smear on city sidewalks,
a defrocked millionaire caught
with his pants down ‘round his ankles.
The sanctity of Santa Clauses
invaded by the baron on the hill
amuses us until we need
Saint Nicholas ourselves.
Holly from Above / for Dean Ekdahl
A capital view of holly trees
green laurel and the plum
as we glide low and nearly slam a fence.
Holly from the top is scarecrowlike
all jagged edges reaching out
to paw the air.
Such a prickly Christmas stuff
with not the symmetry of evergreen
or stately stationary pine,
it is as if a vine pushed on its own
away from fence or trellis
and went seeking clouds
only to be toed down flat
by heaven’s foot.
Laurel is laurel, I’ll give it that
and plum proud plum
but none could see
a holly tree from up above
and honor it with carols.
This dwarf not even good enough
for larger trees to squat upon
is barbed wire sure as metal
intertwined with spikes,
the likes of it no different from
tacks scattered to ensnare
the nighttime bandit.
Rest on, you gentlemen too merry
to observe the upper half
of holly branch
before you placed it on the altar
of a mass for Christ.
Some beauty stops
on anything dark green in color,
but holly should have been
Good Friday flower,
a wreath of it a simile
for crown of thorns
with berries to remind us of the blood
that dripped from off His head
to shoulder, then to ground.
Holly seen from eighty-foot balloon
descending
stands out as verdant vine
to top off crucifixions.
-from In Someone’s Shadow, 1984 with revisions 12/19/2004
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