Christmas Day

    I left the others in Orthopaedics
    Milling about your grandmother’s bed,
    And went outside, inhaling impatiently,
    Walked past the bone bank, chose a stick
    To prod the bare wet beds, went around a shed
    To where they keep the rubbish, suddenly
    Quiet in myself for the first time in days,
    As though I had finally figured out a way

    To be. Your grandmother’s broken femur,
    The hospital talk, you even, hardly
    Mattered to this feeling, based on nothing:
    Nothing, and the gray-born allure
    Of the empty yard, everyone gone, only
    The guard at the gate, down the hill, holding
    In his gall against the rain, managing
    A Christmas grin for everyone, then cursing

    His fate. I always find out where they keep the trash.
    Orient myself from there, then work back
    Step by step, to what is out of joint,
    Skewed, or illegitimate. A bashed
    Box, blighted bedpan, eyes that tack
    Back and forth without a point,
    Composing lists.
    The street behind the wall on which I pissed

    Was dead. I’d gone up and down it
    For a decade. Now, prodding a can
    Or two, some fresh orange rinds,
    The plunger of a used syringe, and letting bits
    Of thought have it out, like drunken Romans
    In the Latin of the mind:
    I stopped to test a cactus for the figure
    Of its leaf: plucked and boiled down, they cure

    Cancer. Next to a purple-berried bush
    I left the parking lot entirely, went
    Back, to berry picking, the methodic
    Work of being young, the taste of lust, pushed
    In ways that went against the bent
    Of need: all the shattered bucolics
    Of my youth. Spread out against my soft
    Beginnings: the sick, the rent, the coughed-

    Up. It’s somehow calming. Walking here
    On Christmas day, past the brake and bracken
    That seems to threaten the respiratory
    Section, branch-scratched windows, an uncleared
    Path, remind me of something Russian
    I dreamt up, and then missed patiently
    All my life: that small birch in front of me,
    How all must end in pleasing monotony.


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     Martin

     Earl