Waterbug

X Marks the Mas

Good Will

I am in favor of goodwill to men or even
to persons. People were cute babies.
It's not nice to be mean to them
just because they grew up, or failed to.
I wish us all well, and I wish all of us
vision enough to see the goodness
of others that others, themselves,
rarely surprise in the mirror; vision
to feel their needs as we feel our own,
so that the well we wish them
is truly theirs. And I wish us
the strength to do what we know
we ought, or when we don't, to say so
and make it right, lest vision
be clouded over by our need not to see
what we have become, so that we cannot
see others at all, much less that they
deserve our good will--or even that WE
deserve our good will. And I wish
all of us the well that comes only
from well-wishing.
____________________________

Pretend Better

Christmas - the disapointment and having to pretend
not to be disappointed: Beneath the tinsel
a dying tree; beneath shiny paper and ribbon
hearty best wishes with a towel, toy or tie,
and tomorrow the same arguments about
who gets what, and soon Monday morning.
It's the same front yard with colored lights.
It's still winter.

But it took nervous preparation
to dress up the day for this masquerade,
ready the home for a hohoing ruddy cherub
who brings us our hearts' desires,
teach children to awaken to listen and glisten;
weeks of work before, children all,
bubbling over with expectancy of pleasing,
we come home from school to present to Mom
our crudely cut, roughly daubed gift,
and Mom (again, each of us),
truly gifted fellow-maker of specialness,
says, Oh! It's lovely! - meaning
the child's excitement, but letting that
enlighten the gift, the eggshell tatters
of colored paper on the floor from which
a new day is hatched.
______________________

Florida at Christmas

I've never been into Christmas, and it seems,
in all its colored twinkles, to mask with banality
the miracle of any light bulb or sun or seeing,
but I remember the enchantment of a night world
of settled snow, my Dad driving us through
the plowed streets of Highland Park (in St. Paul)
to see all the jeweled houses, all that whiteness,
the hush of the loudness of our slush-wet tires,
all those winking cascades of red, green blue
beneath the sharpest nearest stars I'd ever seen,
each house, in the stillness, a kind of music.
Not much white hush here in Florida,
and one neighbor's idea of Xmas decor
is a flower pot from which springs a 4-foot
vertical sausage of gold tinsel, like a gilded
Marge-Simpson hairdo. But the stars are up there
somewhere in the haze, and there's hush and
music enough in your eyes to light
the whole neighborhood for me.
_________________________

Why is every holiday
Such a very solid day? --
Merry day? No -- maladay,
All quantity, no qualiday,
Exhausted from our locust-swarming frenzy in a mall a day,
The world a voice inquiring if it might please share my
wallet, eh?
Overspending-overeating-disappointing-squalid day,
Greedy-kids-exchanging-notes-on-how-big-was-your-haul?-iday,
A day that I am much relieved to be allowed to call a
day.
______________________________________________

What's the big Deal?

Much of it is winter, so I've heard,
Christ's birthday altered and patched on
to old Pagan Solstice festivals, a patch
of warmth, gifts, hot food, booze, smootching
to see us through the grim months. Odd inversion:
People leave the tropics to visit home and have
a "white Christmas" so that they can celebrate
relief from same: Cold comfort, like being told
that God's Son has just died to save a few
and ensure that the rest are eternally damned
(or were they anyway?),

but that's the Easter Egg and Wear-Your-New-Hat-
In-A-Parade day, sorry, this month is just
God's Son getting born "on a cold winter's night,"
images of shepherds beating their hands together
(in ragged gloves?) and blowing clouds of steam
to blur jagged stars.

But for us, those of us who don't yet know
the names of the stars we follow,
it isn't a question of judging:
It's what is; this is what people do. So we make
the best of it, find points of agreement:

Dear Christians, Good will to you, too,
and be as merry as you can without running over
your children. And yes, isn't the birth of a child
a lovely thing? And a mother's love as well?
And the smell of pine needles and a warm hearth
and the possibility of a spiritual existence
beyond tax collectors and rendering unto Caesar,
of life in us that survives the putrifaction
of flesh? And the kindness of dogs, sheep
and cows crowding 'round to share their warmth
and the cool elegance of snowflakes amid laughter...
__________________________________________

Who made Mary...

and how did myrrh-y become merry (which,
frankly, incenses me) and Satan become
Santa (I like to think) and Ishtar
become Easter and what-we-are get replaced
by an old white-bearded giant in the sky and
time (our bead-strung handicraft) become solid
irreversible stone and death (our little
joke on each other) become final and compulsory
and bodies become the only game in town -
and who asked anyone to die for my sins?
(And who put the Bob in Bobsshbobsshbob...?)

Hey, quit griping,
give the world an A+ for persistence
and give thanks at the altar
of is.
_________________________________

On Having and Being Had

Odd, isn't it,
how "Having" can  result
in being had.

When I was young, 
I used to wish I'd lived in the
Seventeenth Century. That would be the life,
I thought, being a grand manor lady and
painting watercolors while my husband
the landlord ruled with a sane and equitable hand.

Later it occurred to me that I might just as well
have been a serf or servant, slaving to my master's whims.

And there was no plumbing, no refrigeration,
no motorcars, no central heating.

And even later it occurred to me that ,
if I had been mistress, there's no guarantee
that life would be
one watercolor after another.

What if I'd been married to a brutish lord?
Or died in childbirth?
Or been scandalized by the local gossip
over my latest lover? Or ...

Even without these plainly unfortunate lives,
I would have been had by the demands of my life.
One only imagines that the lord
and lady live quietly. Having servants
-- or serfs or slaves -- subjects them
not only to the welfare of those in their domain
but also their viewpoints and opinions.
(The queen never dines alone with a book, I'll bet.)

Plainly, having cuts two ways.

Pam