It’s all-the-year-round Christmas
and, oh, come let Him adore you,
the astral linkings of the house
cooling, leaving the one superghost.
What with the magnificent art
of living, in the doubt of the extreme
game, the shroud of language
brings a silence full of certainty
pretending that language caused
the world—such an afternoon
world, poised between the crisis
of yesterday’s sunset and the dying
snowflakes, festivals of the mind.
Death, they say, is not even winter,
a mere punctuation mark, as we listen
for her fragrance in the ice which her breath
has become. In some complete history
a universe might have these instant
meadows, might de-flesh or dress in new
bodies if dew in fact covered
both sides of their leaves.
But this slow-release enchantment,
from eternity’s claustrophobic organic
spaces, must be God and his mental
events, his unconstrained imagination
and choice. Waking Him up
might make her vanish with her lime-
topped sword, her bedraggled peacock whisk.