Ordinary Time. Michael D. Riley
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your intention here,
beside the presentiment
of warmth I formed
watching you slap snow
from your wool hat.
Press
your cold cheek
and smile
on mine.
Christ
enter your lips
through mine, a prayer
love calls forty years
of freeze and thaw,
naming as we go
God in the going
on.
Speak
through fingertip and kiss
the word for being
here and gone.
Put your hand here,
Thomas.
I am so cold.
Transcend
the isolate, lips
full on the mouth,
warm now before the fire,
tiny lights, cedar smell,
still clumsy with yearning
after all these years.
Kneel
beside the straw
and figurines, hearth
with andirons
cold as snow,
black bent nails
driven into the fire
that never fails.
Listen
to one whisper
above the choir on the radio,
the splash of wine,
windswept sleet and snow
against the window.
Come
to bed, says the spirit,
mouth full of kisses
in the darkness.
You are home.
Come closer.
The storm rages.
THE POWER
Snow savages the highway
with silence.
Where are the speeding cars
and trucks full of gears?
Where is the road?
Where is the lower yard?
The back porch stairs are gone.
We peer through windows frosted
with breath and our separate
reflected selves.
The ancient temptation
surrounds us. Alone
in our snowbound house, we look
without seeing. How natural
to be afraid.
The tree will not light,
nor the window candles
no traveler would see anyway.
Their blank bulbs are dead
to our rhythmic breathing.
Like half of those we love.
They are never home anymore.
Their decorations are boxed
and forgotten. It is too cold
altogether, and we are snow blind.
Our breath is visible.
Wind moans down the chimney,
leaps with feral eagerness
onto the side porch.
You squeeze my hand.
Our mantel crèche is lost
in shadow as if the child
were never born. The ox, sheep,
camel and kings stare
into the darkness to find him.
I remember years ago,
the cabin drifted in, oil-line frozen,
my iron zero skeleton
an aching cage, three days
to thaw back into life.
Perhaps the everyday—
tinsel, lights, wrapped gifts—
will not return this time.
Perhaps all will be overturned
tonight in a storm
sufficient to the need,
great annunciatory wings
of snow wrapping a body
finally laid to rest.
Come, Holy Spirit.
Grasping hands empty
of things, strong legs
with nowhere left to go,
the brain dims its energy
in favor of the heart,
and in darkness the child
grows, the idea
of the child grows near
thanks to an emptiness
almost perfect.
Come, Holy Spirit.
Beat your wings in time
to our blood-pulse, the lone
plow scraping at the silence,
and this one flickering streetlight.
I SAW THREE SHIPS: MANNY’S CHRISTMAS
From his apartment window the old man watched
Christmas take over the block. Wreaths on doors,
sometimes floodlit. Window candles. Abstract rhymes
of tiny white lights threading bare trees.
He knew his neighbors were no more happy
than he was. All for the kids he supposed.
Then he saw the creche down at Trinity
begin to glow: Jesus, Mary, Joseph
in white plastic clothes. What denomination
Trinity was he had no idea.
But he liked the lean-to and straw, the baby lord.
And “creche.” He liked the slippiness—
French, of course—playing like light around
his mouth. He folded up the killing fields
of The lntelligencer, absentmindedly
looked back over seventy-five years
of assumptions to the tiny stable set
she put up despite the old man’s roarings.
Room to room until he gave up.
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