The collie, fur grayed and patchy, lopes away from his house,
Ostensibly bound for nowhere in particular,
Knowing only that it is that time, his time,
And, as he wanders away for to await that last solitary purpose,
Meanders past a pock-marked and rust-patched single-wide,
Occupied by a young woman (a girl, in truth)
Nursing a newborn, child whose father
Is one in a wide range of unpalatable options.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

They walk, the residue of some boy meets girl,
Along the quiet main street of an equally quiet town,
Utility poles garnished with benign, contented snowmen,
Low-hung five-pointed auguries strung with tinsel,
Brobodingnagian candy canes swaying rhythmically in the wind.
They have arrived at the unspoken yet mutually understood conclusion
That they have taken their particular accident of birth and geography
As far as such a thing may go, yet they walk hand-in-hand,
Fingers intertwined, though tentatively, in some interim rationale.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

On a hill above town, there is a rambling, low-slung edifice
Multiple-winged single-story octopus of a house
Well appointed though sparsely and diffidently decorated,
More hotel than home, decidedly transitory in form and function.
In one of the rooms, dimly lit with little ornamentation
Save a Charlie Brown-esque tree squatting forlornly on a bureau,
A woman is reading softly, almost mechanically,
As if it is a story she has read out loud countless times before,
To a man who is heeding, perhaps, though it is clear
That the act is more essential than the words on the page.
They have a daughter who would be there,
Sitting in a chair or on the edge of the bed,
Hands clasped, though in service of or supplication to nothing tangible,
But she is home with her toddler, a whirligig of a child
Who has found some hidden presents
And is tearing away the wrapping from the boxes,
Laughing unrestrainedly as he showers himself
In a red-green-gold ticker-tape maelstrom.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.