On The Birth Of Our Lord

More and more are saying it is time to come home now,

that the new earth is waiting. Are you there yet?

Have you made a space by the moist willows

and the red-stone gazebo for after the soaked forest’s

rain bath? Have you saved a spot for me?

My father was a material girl living in a material world.

No one understands this. But maybe you do.

They say the new earth will be almost all light.

Think battery wet light neon glow in night.

Or at least that is what I have been told in dreams,

and also that your tears are the healing waters

to create the new oceans of translucent blue.

So I want to make you cry in a good way for hours.

In a good way, I want to make you cry.

It was Christmas 1989; we could not leave the house

for many days. Or was it decades, we could not leave?

I remember it was snowing, but it was not

because of the snow. My father kept us on the sofa

watching that Madonna video on rewind over

and over. My father couldn’t believe he had found it,

that Betamax tape after what he said were four

very sad years. But I cannot remember a time

before or after when he was not sad.

Loved ones were waiting for us somewhere

splendid up North. But we never made it to the train.

All that frothy pink encoded with lines of white-

silver fuzz—the video roll’s unfurling. And now

I hold that image in my mind as something stellar.

The galaxy that is a whirlpool from afar.

Touch me there or in some starburst galaxy

or the galaxy made of mist or somewhere

beyond all time and where there is no matter

but only what comes from within us in dreams.

I am always dreaming of you. And I so want

to go there with you, but my father was a material girl

and I have been living alone in his material world.

I did not mean to be so wrong in this life,

to go on this way. And in the new earth,

will there still be nostalgia? Will my father still

weep for a lovely life he could not be fully inside?

I’m talking about before 1986 but after 1983.

Who were you then?  I forget sometimes

you’re older and that your memories are maybe

what I want to hold most in you. Drizzle over

the tan cement of the Rain Tree Motel across the way,

named for that dreary, oak sheltered space.

Then came the beautiful boys in their acid-wash denim

and rugby with gelled-French suave hair,

their post new-wave style and romantic synth

newly eighteen fresh off their last real summer

and their bicycles to park and play pool inside.

They were all the new Bond boys.

They were all A View To A Kill. I swear, too,

they were made of rain—something warm

something to want to wash your singing within.

My father was always singing. My father

and I watched those boys as though both

harboring a prayer, a secret plea, for another youth. 

Maybe you loved one of them. Maybe one loved

you back too. Maybe both your grey Adidas

sweatshirts were one another’s meaningful weather.

Sometimes I remember how you were

always so wondrously older than me.

Michelle Askin writes: “My poetry and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Raleigh Review, Fogged Clarity, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Arkana, Pif Magazine, and elsewhere. I reside in Virginia.”