Classic Poem

I look out over half an acre
of tarmac and a gas station
to St. James', where the big bell
clamors nine times in its tower
of red sandstone, scattering pigeons,
gathering families, in blues, greens, vermillions
that blink out in the vestibule
like toys tumbled into a box;

and further on, the late shoppers
crowding both sides of the street,
each storefront a little glacier
calving white parcels, to bob
in the pedestrian torrent ...

From a secular point of view,
the thing is astounding: A thousand
townspeople, particulate
and at odds otherwise, now moving
together in one wave, obeying
(as it were) new equations required
by the multiple reappearance along
Main Street of the Holy Family,
the camels and coffers of the Magi.

Much-improving with distance, these
effigies mercifully recede
toward a vanishing-point one might
imagine as approached in time
rather than space: A recession
of Christmases toward the First
Christmas, as though you looked
down the barrel of a telescope,
from the wrong end, and could see it —
" the distant and anterior point, "
Time-Zero, inhabited
by minuscule but familiar figures
in unconscious and honest aureoles.

But, seen or imagined, they're there; that is
not only on the courthouse lawn
in non-bio-degradable plastic,
or again in the hairdresser's window,
but there , at the origin, by
very nomenclature of time,
by Christ and by Christian Era ; there
where the ordinals of our days

begin, where we start counting
solstices, gasping up now
to one thousand, nine-hundred
and eighty-odd ... But although
the faces look straight at us
up the long Zodiacal tunnel,
we are hidden from them
in our blind of tinsel and holly,
of Christmases-out-of-mind.

They know nothing of Christmas —
two saints yet-to-be and a god
not a night old. Nonetheless
it is what they are . No one
in this town, though he forget
the names of the emperors, popes,
nations — or even of his own
neighbors — can forget these
that attach — of all things! — to the sacrament
of selflessness, to the giving of gifts
and the adoration of innocence.
So the hairdresser buys her nephew
a toy submachine-gun; and the judge
sinks enough for a poor boy's tuition
into lights for his spruce trees; and
Sinatra, dreaming of his white
etcetera, turns it to slush;
and Peter is false three times;
and Christian history is two
thousand annals of vanity
and whited sepulchres. . . . And all
spiral around one homely
paradigm of beatitude. . . . Christ,

we don't notice till we get old,
and time foreshortens, how
there was this form to it after all,
how indeed there could be no history,
as there could be no speech,
absent such principle — a grammar ,
without spatial coordinates
yet containing all that's prescribed,
permissible — making coherent:
Europe, The West, from Augustus
to the Sunbelt Republicans;
all appeals to perfection going —
though they go to the sound of gunships
and bullhorns — even so, going
to the still center, to Selflessness.

Now we pass it in perigee. This
is as close as we come, and yearly
the spiral is wider. No one
is uncrossed, them least of all
who were truly gentle — the Son-
of-Mary, say, or the Right Whale — no creature
and no thing, the planet itself
perishing of its man-plague. And
for all that, I can't bear
to sit here alone, am glad
I can pull on my own coat
and walk along crêche street, repeating
Merry Christmas Merry Christmas
and not be thought mad.