Christmas on the Slade Farm

Do you remember 1940 and the hard cold Christmas in the tenant house
where you were delivered by midwife angels? Did you, Betty and Walker
come from your cold bedrooms to find the potbelly grinning with flames
as you rushed into the front room to find 10-penny nail bags bulging
with chocolate covered peanuts, Brazil nuts, orange slices, one tangerine,
and one Red Delicious apple? Did you lay claim to the fruit bag on the way
to your Roy Rogers’s revolvers, Red Band gumboots, fly-back paddle,
one outfit for school? You stomped around the frozen field pretending
to hunt outlaws in your Red Band boots, shiny revolvers, holding your
candy bag like a salvation Jesus sent. Remember how as your hands got
cold in the Roy Rogers gloves, and that back home the potbelly burned,
stoked with green wood you split those winter afternoons. It would hum
with heat all day and Granddaddy would share souse and sliced pork.
Your belly bulged and stretched your revolver belt. You wondered how
Santa or Jesus could have seen you praying for these things from the Sears
and Roebuck catalog those nights you pretended to read the bible only to
dream an impossible faith, miracle of mail order, Christmas up a dirt road.

**

Christmas Promise

Tomorrow children will rush to unwrap
a graveyard of presents buried under the tree.
I take gifts to my parents snuggled in clay;
a storm moves from the north and I remember
tears of ten thousand deaths. A choir of crows
ascends from the hedgerow, black angels in flight.
A solitary buzzard takes the sky as his pulpit
and I shout amen to the sermon. December’s
full moon wears clouds like a prayer shawl,
a manger of stars illuminated by the god eye.
Sweet night wind rustles leaves across the asphalt
making the night walker want to stride forever.

**

Dollar Store Christmas Card for Fat Mama 2006

Fat Mama, I don’t miss those cold up-against-the-wall
nights or the sound of 9 mms, sirens singing or blue lights.
This morning while washing dishes, a blue jay crashed
into the kitchen window. I rushed to see if he was hurt.
But his blue coat was covered by his own blood;
I scooped him up in my hands and buried him out back
by the fire barrel then cleaned the blood off the window.
Settled and sober in the south, I have grown
warm to the slow pace and seldom lock my doors.
There is no hurry here even in rush hour,
just a slow trickle of traffic and a few irate Yankees
herding southerners with honking horns and mad fingers.

Fat Mama, remember when we would get our drink on
and pour bleach over the curbside trash to keep
raccoons and skunks from meddling in our buzz.
Down south three years, Fat Mama, it’s nice here,
haven’t cleaned any bullet wounds or dodged drive-bys.
Hope you are doing well at Christmas
and a blue jay comes to your window.

**

Something for the Middle

The November I was seven you brought
hangers and colored bags home from
the cleaners where you starched collars,
earning extra money for food and clothes.
After supper you’d bend hangers,
twist plastic, making wreaths to sell.
In a platform rocker you swayed
crocheting angels; looping over and under
they grew off-white as you hummed carols
and sang, A wreath ain’t a wreath without
something for the middle.
But this tired Christmas you’re 77
and we come bearing store bought gifts,
watching you struggle with the slipknots;
we leave as the carolers come.
You, strapped in witch knots
sway in your rocker, remembering
the over and under. You loop air
as we search something for the middle.

**

Whitman and Chloe

Walt Whitman lies in my lap as I watch
my granddaughter play with her Christmas gifts,
an organ she pounds as if mentored by Mozart
or Jerry Lee Lewis. I glance at the grassy pages
as she pretends to read her Princess bible about
poor castaway Lucifer and how Jesus kicked
him out because he wouldn’t mind, Just kicked him out!
With another ear I listen to Walt, leafing through
the pages between remote control cars and Princess
Barbie. I dance with wandering Walt and know
her blue eyes are my blue eyes; every strand of her
hair is mine. The importance of her blood is important to me.
Her fingers and toes are the fingers and toes of a Marine
in the Mediterranean. Christmas we are one, father, son,
granddaughter and Walt.