If you put the question to, say, one Ben Haramed,
He would, as befits a wily old desert jackal,
Find such notions of faith and fidelity quite amusing--

(Following stars in search of something ephermal,
With no fixed exchange rate?
Will these specks of light find you shelter
Among throngs of shepherds and sundry fools?
Will your mewling, puking infant provide you succor in that cold city
Where no one makes time for you, save the pickpockets or strumpets,
Each of whom would pawn your drum
For a dram or string of brightly-colored beads?)

And, indeed, if you happened upon a certain wise and well-off trio
Ensconced comfortably in their lodgings several streets distant
From the temporary residence of the object of their pilgrimage
(It is only fit that we pay obeisance,
But to actually stay in such a place, well...)
They would certainly forswear any notion
Of the primacy of the gold piece and the blade
But if you caught them in a more comfortable, unguarded moment
You may able to infer quite correctly that,
While they would express themselves more elegantly
Than some rude wilderness bandit,
You could no more expect them
To exchange their coin of the realm for philosophy
Than you would expect the fold and kine
To keep perfect four-four time.

And yet we believe, in spite of the first-hand knowledge
That the descendants of Balthasar and Melchior can elbow their way
Past whomever they choose, and be greeted, all smiles,
By the bank manager, the lawmaker, the chairman of the board
That our works and our constancy
Shall be recompensed at a sound rate of return
(How could it be otherwise, for didn’t Our Story Teller herself,
Through stiffness of upper lip and fealty
To all things bright and beautiful,
Weather the Blitz as beautiful, as inspirational,
As a cross-Channel Joan of Arc?)
If only we are as steadfast as the chant of the Dies Irae,
As unwavering as the straightforward beat of a single drum
Which follows the procession down the main thoroughfare
As we make our final homecoming.

In my father’s cosmology, God rose late come Sunday morning,
Having wreaked His vengeance by proxy the night before,
And it was a given that we greeted the Sabbath
With whispers and sock-soft tiptoe,
Knowing that his belt (black, wide, thick with implicit warnings)
Hung within easy reach of the bed,
Though sometimes, with no more explanation than
Man alive, what a beautiful world it is today!
Cold cornflake brunches would be postponed
(Our wonder mixed with consternation and rumbling stomachs)
As we would be whisked into the car
In order to sing His praises, our father all but jumping from the car,
Heading toward the preacher at a trot,
Invariably greeting him with Devil’s on holiday, Father,
So here I am (the church was Lutheran,
Though it could have been a mosque for all he cared.)
He’d sit through the sermon, rapt and at attention,
Alternately scowling and smiling, knitting his brow and nodding,
And then he would corner the incumbent occupant of the pulpit
(He’d have scarcely noticed, if at all, that the leadership of the flock
Often changed hands between our cicada-esque appearances)
Backing him into a wall or against a railing
While he jabbered away, pointing or grabbing a sleeve in punctuation,
Gesturing like some latter-day Prospero, arms ****** Heavenward
To embrace the air, the sky, the whole of the cosmos, amen,
While the pastor’s gaze varied from bemusement to outright horror.
Such occasions were outliers, of course,
Father being much more inclined
To spend his Saturday evenings in un-Christian pursuits
Then stagger home singing a litany of done-me-wrong songs,
And his search for a joyful hundred-proof clarity
Ended before he glimpsed fifty, that being time enough
(So the pathologist noted in his final judgment)
For his liver to become elephantine, his kidneys mere pebbles
(Those effects, be they deleterious or otherwise,
Not listed explicitly nor in the footnotes
Which accompanied the post mortem.)

I would not deign to speak for that triumvirate of worthies
Whom I had hoped to accompany, but, for myself,
My journey was of a practical, political nature;
There was any number of shared concerns
Which I hoped to discuss with my fellow sovereigns:
Matters of borders and bandits, tariffs and treaties,
And even if my fellow sovereigns were sincere
In their interpretation of this (I would attest, anyway)
Wholly random celestial event,
They are still very much men of the world,
And on such a lengthy and tedious sojourn
It would only be natural that the discussion would turn
To such duties which only the eminent and elevated can appreciate,
And in course perhaps become the basis
For some understanding and accommodation.

Giving them the benefit of doubt
(For if a ruler is not entitled to that, then who may be?)
It is certainly not surprising
That my erstwhile fellow travelers were taken
By the notion of infant kings and augury from the skies;
When you are insulated from the concerns
Of finding food and shelter, my own father once said,
You’ll find something foolish to worry yourself about.
Having subdued their swath of earth, it is only natural
That they would cast their worries toward the skies,
And who among us has not seen darkness at mid-day
Or huge and inexplicably reddened moons?
I could not blame my fellow potentates for attempting
To divine some meaning from such events,
Nor am I astonished that they would find some
Would-be seer or other self-styled holy man
(And it seems the more ******, unkempt and ill-smelling the better)
Who would be all too grateful
To relieve their anxieties and self-doubts
At the negligible cost of some scant pieces of gold and silver.

Had I been able to accompany that group of worthies
For the entire trek, I would have noted
(Though gently, with the most innocuous of smiles)
That I believe the secret of ascertaining
The absolutes of the universe, the eternal verities,
Is accepting the very lack of their existence.
I have cultivated and consolidated my power
Through the noble arts of compromise and conciliation,
Knowing when and how to provide just enough to gratify
(And, if need be, just enough rope for fools to hang themselves with)
While retaining  those resources
Sufficient enough to slap down those
Who are insufficient in their expression of gratitude.  
Sadly, even these arts are not without their limitations;
Indeed, my journey was cut short
When a particularly inept proconsul
(One of my wife’s kinsmen, that accident of birth
Being his only conceivable qualification for such a position)
So spectacularly bollixed what should have been
A perfectly simple matter of taxation and tithing
That it required my return to handle the matter in person.
No matter, then—those affairs I had hoped to discuss
Will still remain when they have come home
From this particular dalliance with stargazing and saviors
(Ah, such fancies…all hail this sultan of the stables,
This high priest of the hay!)
And there are day-to-day concerns
Which I must see to until that time
They come to the realization
That faith is the luxury of the poor.

We’d stumbled upon it simply by chance,
Playing on a channel heretofore unknown to us,
Almost as if the remote, in a final, desperate attempt
To escape the CGI-augmented Britneys and Biebers,
Had taken matters into its own hands and steered us there
(Indeed, when we tried to find that channel later,
It had gone a-gleaming, replaced by some lower-case Telemundo)
Presenting no outsized and over-decibeled spectacle
But a stark, quiet, indeed all but silent black-and-white panorama
Where a distinctly un-scrubbed and un-homogenized Santa
Delivers no new cars, no cartoon-mouse vacation cavalcade,
No million dollar prize from some scripted faux-survival experience,
But those things from the realm of the small, the subtle:
A sweater, a meal, a bottle for those not overwhelmed by the contents,
All courtesy of a purveyor of gifts seeking nothing more
Than to provide some measure of comfort and joy
For those who were well short on either.
It all tends toward the romantic and maudlin a bit,
One could contend
(And, indeed, did not the teleplay’s progenitor
Insist on spending his eternity on a lonely hilltop,
In order that he could have an unobstructed view
Of the cold, narrow lake
For which he’d formed such an improbable and irrational fondness?)
And those who take such a position may very well be right,
But it is equally likely that we could be better men in a better place
If the notion that we could rise above
Our tin-can and yowling-tabby tribulations
And embrace that within ourselves which is child-like and yet saintly
Was submitted for our consideration on more than an annual basis.

No tinkly tintinnabulation of children’s songs precedes him;
The vaguely Sputnik-esque speaker on the van’s roof
Squawking out Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow,
(The ice cream man is a hillbilly fan)
Tunes so out of time as to be almost beyond time itself,
Not unlike his ancient, off-white conveyance,
A vehicle of no particular make or model,
Bearing license plates issued years if not decades ago
(One thinks that the DMV would have insisted upon their replacement,
But the ice cream man likely retains them through force majeure,
And it would be no surprise if he did not find himself subject
To such notions as licenses and registrations.)

His arrival is not subject to any calendar but his own.
When his truck announces itself for the first time,
It is, by definition, the height of spring;
You notice the leaves have become a fully-formed green canopy,
And you eschew a bathrobe
As you saunter out to find the morning paper.
The next ten, perhaps twelve weeks are a blurry kaleidoscope,
Rife with cones and bomb pops, drumsticks and choco-tacos,
Dispensed with a high-wattage grin and a hearty Mind how you go!
But the ice cream man is always searching the sky
(Sometimes, you would swear he is actually sniffing the air)
Seeking clues like some ancient trying to ascertain the future
In the pebbles and small bugs in a crow’s innards.
At some point, be it late August or mid-October, he is gone,
Leaving you to instinctively grab a windbreaker
If you leave the house after suppertime,
And the shorts and t-shirts are consigned to some large plastic bin
As a matter of course.

Invariably, at some point during his curbside season,
There is the urge to ask him where he goes
Once he determines that his time has ended for another year;
Surely, he cannot live on the quarters and dimes
He tucks into his improbably white apron,
And he must have his obligations to banks and landlords
Not unlike any other man, but somehow the idea
That the ice cream is under the thumb
Of coupon books and past-due notices
Is oddly unnerving, indeed unseemly.
In our minds, he has always been and most likely will always be,
Engine hacking, sputtering, then implausibly purring
As it pulls away from the curb,
Its confectionary conductor
Humming some long-lost Cowboy Copus tune
Which trails off into nothingness as he disappears from view.

Oh, there is light in such places:
The galleries of Soho, the catwalks of Milan,
The boardwalks of Blackpool,
But it exists to flatter, to obfuscate, to tell alluring lies,
A trompe l’oeil of a family picnic
Etched on the wall of an abandoned orphanage,
The siren song crooned by a spider
To the enraptured and wholly credulous fly.

Ah, but the illumination here!
The sun reflecting off the roofs
On those Bob Evans and Shoney’s you would shun,
The starlight backed by a host of owls, a symphony of crickets,
All serving to peel away the layers of artifice and cunning,
To be shucked away like so many cornhusks,
Allowing the secrets of the universe to be whispered to you,
Faintly yet unmistakably, and once moved by these epiphanies
What is to stop you from running along the narrow, unlined streets
And green open spaces in mad, unfashionable celebration,
Exempt from the clucking of the chic and the congnoscenti?

They arrive by the sackload from the main office on the Via del Pontiere,
Pouring from the bags as if a torrential weeping,
Envelopes a collage of shapes, a multiplicity of pastel hues,
Some addressed with all the formality of a judicial summons,
Others bearing no more than the name of the distaff half
Of the city’s most famous equation.
They tread upon paths long since worn flat
By any number of their predecessors:
Tales of love unrequited, passion misspent,
Promises untruthful and unmet.
These epistles and their authors
Seek solace of varying degree and efficacy:
Some seek kernels of actual guidance or blessing,
As if some ancient and inscrutable advice columnist
Had taken up residence in the Basilica di San Zeno,
Others looking to self-heal through the catharsis of the act of writing,
Most content to quietly assert to the universe itself
I am here, I am here, I am here.

Where, then, is the corresponding mountain of missives
For the son of the House of Montague?
Surely, his shade would be as kindred a soul
To those which affairs of the heart have left so disheartened,
(Indeed, more so, he most assuredly
The schemer and dreamer of the dramatis personae in question.)
For him, though, no rambling, rumbling truck
Emblazoned with the lemon-cheerful Posteitaliane markings
Arrives at an office chock-a-block with secretaries
Whose mission is to answer and archive its all-but-holy contents;
More likely, there is some humble cart,
(The wheel bearings frozen up, the canvas mildewed and frayed)
Containing a handful of birthday cards
Intended for some Renzo or Romano
Miswritten by some absentminded grandmother or great-aunt,
The odd solicitation or final-notice
Which shall go no further for all of eternity.
Despite the hectoring tone of the envelope
Stating that the material is critically time-sensitive
And intended for the eyes of the addressee only.