A Tidings of Magpies

Much happiness and joy to you and yours...polar bears optional.

by Alicia Suskin Ostriker To be blessed said the old woman is to live and work so hard God's love washes right through you like milk through a cow To be blessed said the dark red tulip is to knock their eyes out with the slug of lust implied by your up-ended skirt To be blessed said the dog is to have a pinch of God inside you and all the other dogs can smell it please note: artwork by Scott Burdick, Moravian Barn

by Dale Ritterbusch There is this tea I have sometimes, Pan Long Ying Hao, so tightly curled it looks like tiny roots gnarled, a greenish-gray. When it steeps, it opens the way you woke this morning, stretching, your hands behind your head, back arched, toes pointing, a smile steeped in ceremony, a celebration, the reaching of your arms. please note: artwork by Andrés Fernández Cordón.

by Joyce Sutphen I know how the cow's head turns to gaze at the child in the hay aisle; I know the way the straw shines under the one bare light in the barn. How a chicken pecks gravel into silt and how the warm egg rests beneath the feathers—I know that too, and what to say, watching the rain slide in silver chains over the machine shed's roof. I know how one pail of water calls to another and how it sloshes and spills when I walk from the milk-house to the barn. I know how the barn fills and then empties, how I scatter lime on the walk, how I sweep it up. In the silo, I know the rung under my foot; on the tractor, I know the clutch and the throttle; I slip through the fence and into the woods, where I know everything: trunk by branch by leaf into sky. please note: photo by Ron and Kay Weber

by E. E. Cummings little tree little silent Christmas tree you are so little you are more like a flower who found you in the green forest and were you very sorry to come away? see i will comfort you because you smell so sweetly i will kiss your cool bark and hug you safe and tight just as your mother would, only don't be afraid look the spangles that sleep all the year in a dark box dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine, the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads, put up your little arms and i'll give them all to you to hold every finger shall have its ring and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy then when you're quite dressed you'll stand in the window for everyone to see and how they'll stare! oh but you'll be very proud and my little sister and i will take hands and looking up at our beautiful tree we'll dance and sing "Noel Noel"

by Anna George Meek Cream of Tartar, commonly used to lift meringue and angel food cake, is actually made from crystallized fine wine. After they stopped singing for him, the carolers became transparent in the dark, and he stepped into their emptiness to say he lost his wife last week, please sing again. Their voices filled with gold. Last week, his fedora nodded hello to me on the sidewalk, and the fragile breath of kindness that passed between us made something sweet of a morning that had frightened me for no earthly reason. Surely, you know this by another name: the mysteries we intake, exhale, could be sitting on our shelves, left on the bus seat beside us. Don't wash your hands. You fingered them at the supermarket, gave them to the cashier; intoxicated tonight, she'll sing in the streets. Think of the old man. Who knew he kept the secret of levitation, transference, and lightness filling a winter night? — an effortless, crystalline powder That could almost seem transfi...

After diligent research by way of a pocket Hallmark calendar it's certain that 18 years' wedded bliss is the "Rock, Paper, Scissors" anniversary, next may be HeyDay at Ben & Jerry's, then comes the 20 year "Platinum" extravaganza. Good times...

by George Bilgere I check the locks on the front door and the side door, make sure the windows are closed and the heat dialed down. I switch off the computer, turn off the living room lights. I let in the cats. Reverently, I unplug the Christmas tree, leaving Christ and the little animals in the dark. The last thing I do is step out to the back yard for a quick look at the Milky Way. The stars are halogen-blue. The constellations, whose names I have long since forgotten, look down anonymously, and the whole galaxy is cartwheeling in silence through the night. Everything seems to be ok.

by Gregory Djanikian Tarrytown, N.Y. Bing Crosby was singing "White Christmas" on the radio, we were staying at my aunt's house waiting for papers, my father was looking for a job. We had trimmed the tree the night before, sap had run on my fingers and for the first time I was smelling pine wherever I went. Anais, my cousin, was upstairs in her room listening to Danny and the Juniors. Haigo was playing Monopoly with Lucy, his sister, Buzzy, the boy next door, had eyes for her and there was a rattle of dice, a shuffling of Boardwalk, Park Place, Marvin Gardens. There were red bows on the Christmas tree. It had snowed all night. My boot buckles were clinking like small bells as I thumped to the door and out onto the grey planks of the porch dusted with snow. The world was immaculate, new, even the trees had changed color, ...

Has anyone run across this blog before?? I can't remember where I first read about it, but now I think it may have been on World News Tonight. Okay, okay. So, I have no short term memory anymore. Very over-rated anyway. This blog, however, is very sweet, and oddly enough most of the photos don't look that ancient to me...:>) It all really does go by quickly, doesn't it? http://myparentswereawesome.tumblr.com/

by Galway Kinnell I open my eyes to see how the night is progressing. The clock glows green, the light of the last-quarter moon shines up off the snow into our bedroom. Her portion of our oceanic duvet lies completely flat. The words of the shepherd in Tristan, "Waste and empty, the sea," come back to me. Where can she be? Then in the furrow where the duvet overlaps her pillow, a small hank of brown hair shows itself, her marker that she's here, asleep, somewhere down in the dark underneath. Now she rotates herself a quarter turn, from strewn all unfolded on her back to bunched in a Z on her side, with her back to me. I squirm nearer, careful not to break into the immensity of her sleep, and lie there absorbing the astounding quantity of heat a slender body ovens up around itself. Her slow, purring, sometimes snorish, perfectly intelligible sleeping sounds abruptly stop. A leg darts back and hooks my ankle with its foot and draws me closer. Immediately her sleeping sounds...

Nights Our House Comes to Life by Matthew Brennan Some nights in midwinter when the creek clogs With ice and the spines of fir trees stiffen Under a blank, frozen sky, On these nights our house comes to life. It happens when you're half asleep: A sudden crack, a fractured dream, you bolting Upright – but all you can hear is the clock Your great-grandfather found in 1860 And smuggled here from Dublin for his future bride, A being as unknown to him then as she is now To you, a being as distant as the strangers Who built this house, and died in this room Some cold, still night, like tonight, When all that was heard were the rhythmic clicks Of a pendulum, and something, barely audible, Moving on the dark landing of the attic stairs.

by Jim Harrison At dawn Warren is on my bed, a ragged lump of fur listening to the birds as if deciding whether or not to catch one. He has an old man's mimsy delusion. A rabbit runs across the yard and he walks after it thinking he might close the widening distance just as when I followed a lovely woman on boulevard Montparnasse but couldn't equal her rapid pace, the click-click of her shoes moving into the distance, turning the final corner, but when I turned the corner she had disappeared and I looked up into the trees thinking she might have climbed one. When I was young a country girl would climb a tree and throw apples down at my upturned face. Warren and I are both searchers. He's looking for his dead sister Shirley, and I'm wondering about my brother John who left the earth on this voyage all living creatures take. Both cat and man are bathed in pleasant insignificance, their eyes fixed on birds and stars. please note: photo by Jack Norton

by Mary Oliver Chunky and noisy, but with stars in their black feathers, they spring from the telephone wire and instantly they are acrobats in the freezing wind. And now, in the theater of air, they swing over buildings, dipping and rising; they float like one stippled star that opens, becomes for a moment fragmented, then closes again; and you watch and you try but you simply can't imagine how they do it with no articulated instruction, no pause, only the silent confirmation that they are this notable thing, this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin over and over again, full of gorgeous life. Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us, even in the leafless winter, even in the ashy city. I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it; I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart pumping hard, I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wing...

by Anne Porter We're still in Babylon but We do not weep Why should we weep? We have forgotten How to weep We've sold our harps And bought ourselves machines That do our singing for us And who remembers now The songs we sang in Zion? We have got used to exile We hardly notice Our captivity For some of us There are such comforts here Such luxuries Even a guard To keep the beggars From annoying us Jerusalem We have forgotten you.

Three years ago, on December 3, a friend of mine died. It's described in his obituary as "died suddenly," but truth be told, he'd been dying a little everyday since his partner, Tom, left this earth. I was working the afternoon I got the call about Ken; one of the nurses upstairs had heard the bad news and in a hospital bad news spreads quickly. Another nurse covered the rest of my shift, I ran home and changed clothes for the funeral. The church was decorated for Christmas and lit with candles. Every pew was taken with family, friends, co-workers, ex-patients. The music was amazing, including a bagpiper whose sounds filled the space to the rafters. The minister broke down twice crying during the homily. What I remember, though, everytime I think of Ken, or think I see him at the hospital, or on a neighborhood street, or at the local IGA, is the instruction the minister gave us. Ken's death came at the start of Advent, and while we were trying to wrap our brains a...

by Corey Mesler for David Markson "One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with." Flann O'Brien from At Swim-Two-Birds God bless the experimental writers. The ones whose work is a little difficult, built of tinkertoys and dada, or portmanteau and Reich. God help them as they type away, knowing their readers are few, only those who love to toil over an intricate boil of language, who think books are secret codes. These writers will never see their names in Publisher's Weekly. They will never be on the talk shows. Yet, every day they disappear into their rooms atop their mother's houses, or their guest houses behind some lawyer's estate. Every day they tack improbable word onto im- probable word, out of love, children, out of a desire to emend the world.

by Freya Manfred What matters most? It's a foolish question because I'm hanging on, just like you. No, I'm past hanging on. It's after midnight and I'm falling toward four a.m., the best time for ghosts, terror, and lost hopes. No one says anything of significance to me. I don't care if the President's a two year old, and the Vice President's four. I don't care if you're cashing in your stocks or building homes for the homeless. I was a caring person. I would make soup and grow you many flowers. I would enter your world, my hands open to catch your tears, my lips on your lips in case we both went deaf and blind. But I don't care about your birthday, or Christmas, or lover's lane, or even you, not as much as I pretend. Ah, I was about to say, "I don't care about the stars" -- but I had to stop my pen. Sometimes, out in the silent black Wisconsin countryside I glance up and see everything that's not on earth, glowing, puls...