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(for Greta)

Your small shadow with its cupped
hand poised above the tank
transfigures them with joy.
Leaping from dark water, so many
copper filaments, they break
the surface, curve into slippery
arcs, and disappear to feed.
Some day when you ask if miracles
are real, you’ll remember this:
bare branches and a sudden splash
of light, how love is born again
from winter’s need, an open palm,
hopeful, generous, a clear voice
calling, calling to the fish.

I have been thinking
about the difference between tradition
and cliché,
and about my father,
how each December he placed a classic red poinsettia
in my mother’s hands, every year the same
gold foil wrapping the planter, the same
deep green leaves, and about how lately
I bring one home, experimenting once
with the white variant which was not white
but a sallow depleted beige.
I have been thinking about repetition’s
assurance, regular
as a heartbeat, its soothing familiarity
until it stops

“Ladies don’t beat the daylight out of people.”
—Flannery O’Connor

I had to sit down a bit to write this morning
because the last two days I put in maybe 12 hours
sorting the books on nature and religion donated
for the Community Club book sale to benefit
our local public library making countless trips
back and forth between the boxes and my tables
like I was on this eccentric exercise wheel
in an all-volunteer non-Euclidean multi-verse.

Every Thursday Feed Your Spirit meets
in Old South Church, street people,
struggling, wander in, this time to bake
communion bread, the men learning to mix
white whole wheat flour with milk and honey,
rolling out the soft dough to be cut in rounds,
each round marked with a cross before being
baked at 375 for thirteen minutes after which
we gather in a circle to pass the bread and
juice to one another, waiting, with cupped
hands, to behold who we are, and become
what we receive.

The letter that arrives already opened, already redacted
says we may finally get a call at Christmas this year.

I don’t ask, What is Christmas to a Rabbi anyway?
Where is Bethlehem to a city kid?

Where were the wise men when we also needed gold,
would have settled for myrrh?

I don’t ask why no one in B Unit knows Jesus was born in August
because it’d be a mistake to blame this on Jesus, anyway—

Each word’s a pickled egg, the lecture
a grimy jar. Outside everything
blooms funky & hot
like landscape done by Prince
                          (the sun hands out yellow lollipops)
& students keep their eyes

crawling like houseflies on the window glass.
By one & two they start to nod & startle,
nod & startle until
the whole backrow looks like a horn section
grooving in sync. The clock, too, falls asleep
& slides off the wall.

A truck driver driving up with a load of hay found a peacock
turning before him in the middle of the road, shouted,
“Get a load of that bastard!” and braked his truck to a shattering halt.
—Flannery O’Connor, “The King of the Birds”