(POSTSCRIPT TO AUTHOR'S NOTE:  As the bit of my brain which allows me to actually complete a piece of writing seems to have gone on hiatus, this chestnut is re-submitted for your approval)


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.


(AUTHOR'S NOTE: This poem owes a considerable debt to the December 23, 1960 episode of The Twilght Zone.  The episode, entitled "The Night of the Meek", features Art Carney as a decidedly down-on-his-luck department store Santa who receives a helping hand courtesy of Messrs. Serling and Claus.)

(AUTHOR'S NOTE:  This is a re-post of an older piece, but I am inexplicably fond of it, so I thought it warranted being on the line to air out once more.)

This most silent of silent nights
Was no different from any which had come before it,
Nothing at all to mark it as extraordinary or sacrosanct:
The village had long since stopped putting up decorations,
(Lights featuring jolly snowmen and steadfast wooden soldiers,
Now faded, cracked, with ancient and capricious wiring
Impossible to replace and impractical to repair)
Those old enough to harbor warm memories of caroling
Having long since wintered in some southern locale
Bearing Spanish names of dubious authenticity,
Those left behind by circumstance or stubbornness
Very likely slouched behind a cash register or un-crating paper towels,
The Wal-Marts, Kinneys, and Price Choppers,
In a shotgun marriage of customer service and rank capitalism,
Staying open a bit later every year,
Though at least providing the unanticipated benefit
Of one less hour to fret over things unbought,
One less hour to dwell upon promises unmet.

There is some solace, perhaps, in the notion
That the good times were only so good, after all
(It’s been said when the great ditch connecting Albany and Buffalo
Was finally completed, you could already hear train whistles,
Shrill and of ominous portent, in the distance)
And as Barbara Van Borland,
Thrice-married and eternally hopeful,
Opined from her perch at the Dewitt Clinton House,
If you’re gonna fall, better offa stool than a ladder.
Perhaps there is a certain mercy in laboring under the yoke
(Allegorical, but securely fastened all the same) of knowing
That we should expect little and prepare to make do with even less,
That these hard times are the only times we can expect to know.

How, then, do we carry on?  
Follow Pope’s dictum, one supposes,
And say your lines and hit your marks
With as much conviction as can be mustered
As we walk through this land of shuttered country schools,
This forest of plywood and concrete,
Where shoots of grasses and patches of weeds
Rise up through crevices and faults in the neglected blacktop
(But ride out on the back roads of the other side of river,
Out toward Cherry Valley, say, or Sharon Springs,
And see the wide panorama of the valley below,
The hills gently, gradually sloping upward to the Adirondacks,
Creating a vista which would make Norman Rockwell blush,
And you would say My God, how beautiful
If it didn’t seem foolish to give voice to something so patently obvious)
Until that time we are carried gently to that plot
Where we shall lie down next to our parents
In the newer section of the cemetery
Sitting hard by the edge of the sluggish Mohawk,
Where the remnants of by-products
From dormant farms and long-closed tanneries
Mix with the residue of hasty abortions
And the bones of forgotten and un-mourned canal mules.

They have always been among us,
Preening and parading through their brief tenure,
Those acolytes of taking their final bows
While safely in their prime,
Ensuring the photos and screen-shots
Scattered on walls and tables
At their memorial service
Are the remnants of an eternal if truncated youth.
I would (having passed such a time anyway)
Demur to embrace such a notion,
As such an exit strikes me as the final half-measure
In an existence comprised of nothing but,
The process of having left hearts a-flutter,
Cleaved in half yet never made whole,
The tales suitable for guffaws and back-slaps,
But invariably involving merely one protagonist.
I have looked in the mirror, and wanly recognized
The lined face, the thinning and graying patch
Topping that sad apparition,
And I have resigned myself to the notion
That, when I am a thing of the past tense,
My remembrance will be in quieter tones,
The attendees with faulty aortas and rebuilt hips of their own,
And though the anecdotes about my final years
Will be short on notoriety and things
Not subject to the statutes of limitations,
Let it be remembered that I not only loved,
But lived that love as the contented part of a whole,
And that, though those days were not raucous
Nor involved more than one end of a candle aflame,
That I squeezed every **** last bit
Of all that time and tide had allotted.

And so you have come to this immutability,
Delivered by those forces, those fates
(Unseen, perhaps things of our own making,
Unshakeable in any analysis)
Complicit in our preordained rest and rust,
That which made that Ephesian,
Ruefully reading the eternal river
To see there was some eddy, some oxbow
Predestined as the end to his temporary journey,
Deposit his scroll in the great temple,
And such for all of us, then,
The marble chiseled and graven,
Final but for a few finishing touches,
The fate of all men, fated to dust yet invulvnerable,
Shadows brought to the precipice
Of such things which are inescapable
Yet chosen by us nonetheless.

Such were evenings of the type too often marked as sultry,
But sometimes such descriptions are apt
And thus denoted as so;
We would be well into the bottles and cans
To such point as we were not wearing them particularly well,
And so we spoke of things
Which may or may not have mattered,
The relative merits of cinema femme fatales
Dead four, perhaps five decades,
The notion of such women who had it,
(Followed by the de rigeur toasts to Chrissy Hynde,
And long may she wail)
Various things which disappeared with the fog and dew
Once sunrise made its unhappy presence known,
And when the old boiler suggested that sleep and abstinence
Constituted the prudent route to follow,
I excused myself for a walk,
(Nodding to my brother-in-law as he nodded,
Possibly but not invariably still awake)
Undertaken in various shambling states of unsteadiness
Back to my mother-in-law's house
Muttering silent regrets for the lack of bread crumbs
Mixed with somewhat less than sotto voce snippets
Of songs sung earlier with considerable gusto
And nearly adequate fidelity to sharps and flats,
And if I had maintained a relative judiciousness in my intake
(The alternative an unpleasant return to my domicile pro tem,
Usually marked with an entrance featuring mud and mayhem,
More or less forgiven the next morning)
I would, if the evening was clear and still,
Speculate upon the nature of the starlight,
Be it the distress calls of celestial bodies dark and listless
Or something in its salad days, so to speak,
And often it would strike me as somewhat less than fitting
That not a single glass had been raised to their health.

(for Thom Hickey)

It is, one supposes, a business establishment, if just barely
Though more than one would-be shopper,
Having been squeezed against some ancient china cabinet
Or banging an unsuspecting knee
Against some camouflaged table leg,
Has opined that it as if four walls and a low-slung ceiling
Had suddenly thrown themselves about a yard sale,
In any case the place being filled with such things
Which are, if by no means useless bric-a-brac,
Rendered unremarkable, even somewhat undesirable
By their very familiarity,
And in the midst of this rabbit warren of commerce
(Holding an ancient clarinet in his left hand,
Wand-like, a bemused Prospero considering its pros and cons)
Is the proprietor of the shop,
And he notes that you have stopped
In front of some sixties flying-saucer-***-willow-tree lamp,
And he says Ah, well let me tell you something about that,
Holding forth on its manufacturer,
The curious backstory of its design,
And how he came in possession of several other pieces
At the same time, and of course they have their own tales as well,
And you can't help how this confusion of things of former lives
Has suddenly taken on a certain light, a glow even,
The illumination of shared memory,
The recollection of why such things hold a place
In our pasts and presents, and after you exit
You give in to the musing that there were some items
You did not give due consideration,
Which may necessitate a return trip.