Home
Yule House
Consider the house, yours, theirs, a breath, stasis
between the grinding this and that. The winds blow
and shake the trees above the roof, above the magi
and kings bobbing and blinking from their tableau.
Their knees are bent in bonsai replication
of the night when, sand-pocked, blood-sore, they found lodging,
a pocket for safe-keeping, a temporary station
thick with incense, and visitors, and every trespass
turned insubstantial as snowflakes on the tongue.
Kill them all, says some Herod. And there you are, parents,
lugging a child, some keepsakes, as once you had to a stable
desperate after your angel’s appearance.
Bow your heads as round a dinner table,
breath mingling sweetly in the dark with the cows’,
for daylight hurtles west and your tiny house
sits squat before its freight train tonnage.
