December is here

About ten years ago, I bought my first issue of Poets and Writer's magazine. I loved it because, in addition to writing about various author's work, the articles included information about where the writers lived, what their houses/offices/workspaces looked like, what kinds of jobs they had before they "made it," and what weird writing rituals they had. When I was in my MFA program, I would sometimes joke that I should have gone into anthropology instead because I was more interested in what writers did, where they did it, and how they did it than I was in reading anything they wrote. So PW fed that appetite for details that exist beyond the official text.

Additionally, there were pages and pages in the back of ads for journals, magazines, and anthologies looking for poems. I highlighted dozens of them without knowing a thing about any of the publications. I got a box of large manila envelopes and started sending poems out willy-nilly.

Within a month, I'd gotten an acceptance back from a journal called New Zoo Poetry Review and I was thrilled. "Hey," I thought, "this publication thing is easy!" and I secretly sneered at my friends and teachers at school who bemoaned the difficulty of getting published. Yes, I had the writing world by the tail.

Of course, I was just wildly lucky and that's all there was to it. The poem was pretty good, I think, and the journal turned out to be reputable in the way that small, short-lived journals are but the fact is, I was just lucky. I've gotten published in other places since then but a lot of it had to do with people I knew or being involved with the publication myself somehow. Getting a poem in NZPR was one of the only times I blindly sent in work that was read and accepted purely on its own merits. Ah, how early success ruins us!

Anyway, the whole point of this little reminiscence is that the poem in question was called "Nativity" and it was on my mind this weekend as the ladies and I went to the giant creche exhibit hosted by the Ann Arbor ward. Every room of the meetinghouse except for the bathrooms, janitor's closet, and chapel were stuffed with Nativity scenes from every corner of the globe. Some were sublime, some were mundane, but the display itself was really impressive and very worthwhile to visit.

With that show in mind, I thought I'd dig out one of my two complimentary issues of NZPR and reprint "Nativity" here for everyone who hasn't read it. (And that would be just about everybody. Needless to say, the journal didn't exactly have a large readership. More like, the editorial staff, the contributors, and the contributors' mothers.)

Nativity

On my knees in front of our altar-shaped table,
practicing the necessary reverence of fragile things,
I unpack the Nativity:

Mary in frozen worship,
Joseph next to her,
his arms gathering in his new wife,

broken and chipped camels and donkeys,
three bearded men,
one man with a lamb in his arms.

Hard, little, plaster Christ-child comes last,
set in the center of concentric circles
of wise men, shepherds, and sheep.

Outside, the wind moves
like herds of cold beasts
trundling past the door.

The altar-table washes
with the advance and retreat of fire light,
its battle with blue from the window.

Each figure performs
a motionless dance
with its shadow shivering behind it.

The child in the hard cradle
is ruddy dark, with too-blue of eyes.
Passive, unknowing, he reaches up.

In the palm of his barely defined hand,
a shadow gathers and then dissipates,
like faith in a windy heart.

Bundled in brick and stone of my house,
a fire banked and hot in its place,
my family quietly about,

I look at this village of figures,
their serene, permanent faces,
their inflexible and fragile existence.

How alike we are
with this holy family,
its onlookers and animals!

We too dance
with our chipped shadows
cast huge and grotesque behind us.

We too have something
at our center that reaches up and out,
something holy.



So there it is. Normally, I would be loathe to print my own poetry here but it's as close as any of my work comes to seasonal or festive so I thought I'd make an exception.