Read This Poem at the December Open Mike at King's Books

Christmas Angels 1960s

 

White Christmas 
A Poem From The 1990s 

My list of birds I saw in the winter.  Robin,

Spotted Towhee, American Widgeon, Surf-Scoter -

Herring Gull, Woodpecker, Oregon Junco -

who appears here in the bushes, inside
the flowering camelia at the door.  Once
I wanted to see White Christmas.  No one else

wanted to go.   But my mother let me off

in the dark above the Rialto; the neon, but
only the street, dark, and other cars.
Canada Goose, Wood Duck, Buffle-Head -

Hooded Merganser, Heron, Hawk, Wren -

White Christmas was fine.  Only the worn
gummy carpet, the curtain that slowly flung
open and the Technicolor.  I was in junior high,

but there was nothing wrong in being alone

at the movies.  We never ascended the levels
at the Roxy to the stained glass.
Western Grebe, Cormorant, Sparrow, Crow -

Goose, small tit inside the many blossoms

of the flowering quince.They restored the Roxy,
the old Pantages.  In the dark we never noticed
that the curtain was magnificent.
 

Now during the vigor of arms at violins

we glance up at a sculpted muse with sheaves
of grain.  And the Rialto, too, is restoration.
And on the street of stores a chickadee

might try the new branches of the saplings.

Today was tree day.  Blocks I walked from school
are anchored by them, eight each way, small pears
and they are flowering.  And a sparrow,

the sparrow who would greet you kindly

at the bus stop, who would stop and stand
and look from concrete that I thought went
to the center of the earth, but that was not,

perhaps, that deep, but ony a thin shell

over top soil.  The mallard, the pigeon,
the others I could not recall.  Or could not name.
The Varied Thrush, the Flicker, the Golden-Eye.

And the Eared Grebe, and the Sparrow

with the stripe, the dark one.