The Dance of Christmas
"When cockleshells turn silver bells
And mussels grow on every tree
When frost and snow shall warm us all
Then shall your love prove true to me"
(Medieval Lullaby)
They started burning down Columbus Avenue
The day before the Last Christmas
And the boutiques and shops were ashes when I left
I drove almost five hundred miles that day without a stop
Most of it on deserted interstates - Past shut-down tolls and hojos
Because everybody had gone down into their holes
Even though the satellite dew-lines hadn't yet lit up
What scared them though was that right after the morning news
The TV's all went black and I guess everyone figured because the U-N
Had been torched the night before - maybe this time it was for real
So I was beat and almost out of gas
And when I saw this thirties-deco sign for Lido gas
Flashing way off through new snow
I threw the old Toytota Landcruiser into lo and plowed right off that six-lane
Up to this worn-out mom-and-pop on Old Route One
I pumped myself the last four gallons they had left
And when I went in to see what else there was to boost
I saw them and they were dancers I was sure
Cheap red wine was all they'd bought and a mars-bar for her
And they were counting coins out for the old guy in the gloom
But what intrigued me most was they were dug
From a bejewelled evening bag by the emaciated girl
Who dropped one and it sang so I knew it was real silver
And in the lot outside spun soft by head-lit snow
I saw that she was middle-big with not much time to go
So I followed their ancient Subaru for twenty-seven miles
Down through the empty-center of a rivers-split Maine spit
To a blistered no-name Baptist church smoking on the headland
Some naked studs bared on its northeast side
Shingles curled some gone - but all-in-all still mostly fit
Everything round it though had fallen down
A pocked scape of ice-filled holes once topped by dormered capes
That spelled a once-and-peopled place
Now only weirs were remnanted and angle-skewed in coves
With shredded cuts of spruce where once the working wharves thrust up
And claws of hard-fasted ice sharpnelled smashed cobs
Their remains cloned beyond into fantastic sepulchers
Tide-scalloping the frozen bay
They saw me then before the black set in
And waved me to the broken church - its back stacked as it was
Against the massive spruce-head spur
So that the wind was split into a thousand shafts by sentinel pine
And softened to pleasant moan inside
And it was warm in there
A scented salt-sweet smoke hazing the upper beams
Mixed with the bitter fragrance of the pine-pot on the hearth
For they were boiling beer to celebrate the birth
God only knows how two of them not two hundred pounds between
Had tackled up a thousand tons of rock
And built this russian oven right on that ledging face
Where once an antiseptic altar stood
And now that oven's endless chains chimed softly on its reels
Propelled by driftwood heat which also baked the azymed bread
Suspended on its shelves
That warm soaked too in the rock and rose into my bones
As weary now I settled in a shattered pew
And waited for the final service to renew
She came and sat beside me then as the boy went round and pumped the lamps
And as the light bleached out the dark I saw that they were painters too
They'd decorated every crack and cranny of the vault
With stern-faced saints and holy maidens and flooded them with gilts
Sublimated with alizarins and lustrous lazulies
The apostates had walked out long before the baptists repossessed
And now the once-naked nave gleamed brilliant
With streams of their abandoned vestments pulled from encrusted chests
And hung from soaring astragals
Out of dredged teak from some palatial wreck
They'd even carved the holy bema-doors
God's Mother the Theotokos at left - Her Son as always to the right
Lifted with longing from the jungle-wood
Festooned with saffroned peri-winks and blue beach-sanded glass
I felt her touch and as I turned to look
The boy lit robber-candles before each minor saint
And this I did not understand
Was I wrong?
Was it just possible they were migrating magyars?
Perhaps the last two atsigans wrung from an extinguished hindu tribe?
Doomed by some genetic curse to course this marbled round
Until the flame they worshipped torrefied our sphere?
Were they now setting out to steal what they really had not made?
To take from where they'd knelt?
Strip the still-hidden apse where they once sprawled
Sobbing up fears and joys and misbeliefs?
It was with primordial eyes
Glint-garneted and venerable coals quiescent in reproach
Love-glistered with sacrificial tears mirrored in mine
That she dissolved in eloquent relief
Man-rooted self-centered disbeliefs
God first was Woman - I was certain now
Alone - Haired-over and a dwarf
She swung down from the shrinking primal forest-dark
Mothed by the brilliance of abyssinian savannah
And halting-stood to peer above the taller grass
Before she squatted on that sun-warmed mound
To drop her double-helixed babe
She stood before me now
As the first of the ballistic mycotoxins arched above
And somehow her strange whisperings told me
We'd come full circle doppler-wise
Because the deadly fungus would be followed soon by mop-up mega-shots
As both led me to the lavabo for the last time
It was that all our tears would mix together in the holy bowl
And now with purified hands
We heaped huge cuts of spruce upon the hearth
To light the farthest corners of the shrine
The chains were lowered and the bread brought forth
The cups were filled with bitter piney brew
We drank and drank until the pot was tossed and then I fell
Before the still-shut screen and slept
When I awoke clad now in purest muslin-white
The altarstone shone forth from newly-parted amphithyre
This huge basaltic millstone once carved from pre-silurian slag
Had been deposited as if by some exalted force before the apse
Its frontal iridesced by isinglass and malgamed mussel-pearl
And on its recessed rosewood board cross-carved with sacred signs
Blazed brilliant the bottle-chalise of their wine
Filled to its neck (or so it seemed) with rubies cut
From far lime-caverns of Ceylon
The altarboard held too the paten's ironstone
With to-be-concecrated bread still fragrant-warm
From the cob-oven's eucharistic shelf
And as I lay transfixed
The boy resplended now in white and cloth-of-gold
Mounted the sacred stage
Crismarium cupped in his hands
He poured the holy oil on all four corners of the board
Then dipped a tiny square of linen-white and gave it to the girl
Godmother
She'd robed herself in flowing scarlet-maddered silks
Thrown on some fabled looms in Radsimir
A radiant sybil dressed in dazzling organzine
She placed the unguent-cloth above the center of my eyes
Anointed
She gave me of the bread - He of the wine
And then they sat me down to watch the final dance
The fire roared as they poured on more boughs and drift
The flames spat-spit beyond stone pillars of the pit
With steps measured in sand through an infinite glass
They moved to touch - A glittering and sanctified glissant
Their ageless eyes love-locked in selfless grace
Then suddenly he lifted her and whirled in place
Silk-fire fused with cloth-of-gold
Her body became his
They were but one imploring form writhing there on the chancel steps
And now I knew why they had lured me to their gypsery
Reluctant sacristan they'd made of me as I brought forth their Child
And laid it wrapped in altarcloth upon the timeless rock
Between the bread and wine
I turned to face the oven crimsoning the nave
In time to see them both consumed by zarathrushtran fire
For they had cleansed themselves (or so they thought)
Of iconoclasts like me
As when they first had danced a thousand centuries ago
Before the aryan flame
But as before their agonies had been dishonored and abused
They'd failed again with me and mine
Or had they?
For as I looked back
The altarstone was sudden-shapeless black
The Child and all the holy things were gone
And in their place
Splendigital in their malevolence
Some burnished grains of silica glared
This vacuous legacy of louts
Had stripped and savage-strobed the gentle shrine
Into a electronic snake-pit writhery gone mad
An amplified and syncopated panasonic lunacy
Riding a thousand-line special matsushita track
And so it came to pass
In this mind-shattering Cathedral of the Hip
That Child had been replaced by Chip
Outside the southern fire-force
Ash-laden with cremated cities of the south
Had reached the frozen coves
As super-annulated mega-heat
Boiled ice into vermillion steam
I heard her last and first and loveliest of songs
For as I breathed the final rem-soaked firefly
Exultant in exquisiteness came her primeval lullaby
"When cockleshells turn silver bells
And mussels grow on every tree
When frost and snow shall warm us all
Then shall your love prove true to me”
Recent Comments