On a wet branch song
pierces the grey air. Green notes
sight on the mist like a revolver.
Grief and love are one.
Green branch, hot fog,
shot like song dissolved.
Ferns through a blue jar
glass, highlighted, deep
as winter cold, shining soft
as vision's Christmas festival.
To describe this house, the straight-
nailed angles, minimal but important
molding, all that pain that holds
memories together — to describe this dream
only because it is more painful than
living — wine, butter, flowers; to enunciate
once again the pain of hammers
driving home connecting spars;
building a house where experience
changes as often as returning, finding
the same dry smell, the prickling cold;
to describe wrenching and remorse,
the misdirected nail, is nothing,
is poison or physic, taken daily
or in homecomings — is nothing
where the powdering fern and the dimmed-
as-heaven blue transparency
say to eyes, say to the house, say
to the owner of pain-construction,
why have you not seen? Was it
too hard? too hard to love?
how did you find me?
And, in the manger seen through
blue glass, dim forms, faraway
lands of a smaller dream,
perfected and unreachable save by
this moment's light, shepherds ask,
have we seen? we bring something to a star,
something to the only miracle our world
was prepared for, we bring gifts
