Two poems for Christmas by Joseph O’Brien

White Christmas

• Forecasters generally consider a white Christmas
• to be an inch of snow on the ground
• or an inch falling that day.
• -News Item

• But along the river bottoms, snow found no place,
• When together we went walking there
• After life fell apart.

• Your flustered hands gently wrestled
• With the chill in the folds of your overcoat.
• Frightened doves, they could not bear to be held,

• Holding to themselves
• In a barren nest untouched by tenderness,
• Yet wanting to fly from flesh to flesh

• In a birth of unmolested whiteness.
• I knew you as one who lived in minor chords and
• Your falling apart was only the latest note,

• Inescapable as the ache that comes with snowfall
• Disintegrating a forest’s edge in a flurry of silence,
• The nudging ache that waits forever.

• And I knew your latest sorrow,
• Like the winter twilight in your eyes, always
• Tinctured by stars and snow.

• Setting your hopes on a white Christmas,
• You put a quiet faith in the world’s poor weather,
• And stood to hear nervous cattails

• Tapping at the river’s crusted edge—
• There, you scanned the overcast skies with eyes
• Dark, damp, beautiful as a forest floor—

• Always an inch away from drowning in joy.

• Uncle Paul’s Pear Tree
• Uncle Paul played the hunter each Christmas –
• Out among the frozen hills with gun in hand,
• “It takes more than blood-thirst to hunt, I guess,”
• He’d say. “You have to know what’s on your land.”
• He’d come back, a bird in bag and listless
• To tell a tale. He’d fumble words in his head,
• Then begin: “Today was miraculous…”
• He’d wandered around the land of the dead
• With light snow from last night as the world’s pall.
• He’d heard a crow sing for mercy on the ridge,
• And in an old pear tree he’d found his soul.
• “Like Saul for David, I chased that partridge…
• That pear tree always drops an early fruit,
• Yet each year it gives me a bird to shoot.”

Joseph O’Brien is the poetry editor for the San Diego Reader.