A Pair of Poems for Christmas Day

Christmas Tree

By James Merrill

To be

Brought down at last

From the cold sighing mountain

Where I and the others

Had been fed, looked after, kept still,

Meant, I knew—of course I knew—

That it would be only a matter of weeks,

That there was nothing more to do.

Warmly they took me in, made much of me,

The point from the start was to keep my spirits up.

I could assent to that. For honestly,

It did help to be wound in jewels, to send

Their colors flashing forth from vents in the deep

Fragrant sables that cloaked me head to foot.

Over me then they wove a spell of shining—

Purple and silver chains, eavesdropping tinsel,

Amulets, milagros: software of silver,

A heart, a little girl, a Model T,

Two staring eyes. Then angles, trumpets, BUD and BEA

(The children’s names) in clownlike capitals,

Somewhere a music box whose tiny song

Played and replayed I ended before long

By loving. And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV

To keep the show going. Yes, yes, what lay ahead

Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals

Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come—

No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn’t bear,

Now or ever, dwelling upon. To have grown so thin.

Needles and bone. The little boy’s hands meeting

About my spine. The mother’s voice: Holding up wonderfully!

No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today’s

Dusk room aglow

For the last time

With candlelight.

Faces love-lit

Gifts underfoot.

Still to be so poised, so

Receptive. Still to recall, praise.

The Miraculous Birth

By Joyce Carol Oates

Christmas: The House Adrift in a wide white ocean of snow.

Black December is a ditch winking overhead,

but here beneath your parents’ roof the piecrust faces

are dimpled by forks

and the clock faces are round and smooth as buttons.

This is the season of waiting and of expectation

and of hunger keenly roused to be satisfied.

This is the season of the miraculous birth,

the oldest story,

these years,

centuries—

the fresh-trimmed spruce bristling to the ceiling,

smelling of cold, of night, of forests wild and tamed

as forests in a child’s picture book.

The splendid tree is balanced in a shallow tin of water

looking as if it would live forever—

green-spicy, sharp-needled—

and such tinsel, such trinkets ablaze

on the boughs, a glass-glitter

of icicles, angel’s hair,

strings of colored lights plugged to a socket!

And beneath the tree presents wrapped in shiny paper,

satiny bows, gifts heaped upon gifts—

a child’s fever-dream spilled on the carpet

Outside, snow flying like white horses’ manes and tails;

inside cookies that are stars, hearts, diamonds,

the smell of a turkey roasting slow in its fat.

There are stories children are not told,

of grandmothers dying in secret of their hearts

or of cancer shopping for months for this season—

the costly boxed gifts that are love, the stiff silver paper

that is love, all the effort of joy, love—

torn open too quickly by a child’s fingers.

And there suddenly is your father,

young again,

entering the kitchen, the wind behind him,

snow melting in his wild dark hair,

a carton of presents in his arms.

From what and to what could this world be redeemed?

is not a child’s question.

You are sitting at the long table with the others.

Those years. The roof weighted with snow. Candle flames,

the smell of red wax, O take and eat; the clock tells

its small rounded time again

and again, again—

this is all there is and this is everything.

The miraculous birth is your own.