It fronts as idiocy,
If only because it’s the same visitor,
An old relative,
From days of downy yearnings for gifts,
From a hankering for cartoon foods from image alone,
From the months-long drag to holidays,
From a begging that the snow
Might never melt
And that the sledding might go on forever,
And that barring the rise of the orange street lamp glow
Those familiar laughs might not echo toward
Where you’re no longer together.
The joke is in the held-breath,
The suspense of a horse race –
What might pull into first for you?
It’s a river that slithers down,
Through dark gardens and despite them
With a source in the shadow of reason,
With a running insistence in the face of every science;
Really, it’s a face-up prayer,
Eyes into the vortex of snowfall
Wondering if, please please please,
You might give this to me?
But walk to those paintings
Of anointed and justified forebears –
The catalogue of what five fingers have managed –
And suddenly the breath swells deeper,
Scepticism pales,
And it all seems to be the call
Of loving voices
Saying climb up here
In this air, close your eyes,
In this air, see our heartbeat going back,
In this air, see that we’ve already done it,
In this air, little off-shoot of mine,
History is pregnant
With the possibility of better.