Have a merry GR Christmas

[Doug Millison]

But she did want to go in, nostalgia was heavy in tonight's snow-sky, her
own voice ready to betray her and run to join the waits whose carols we're
so apt to hear now in the distances, these days of Advent dropping one by
one, voices piping across frozen downs where the sown mines crowd thick as
plums in a pudding . . . often above sounds of melting snow, winds that
must blow not through Christmas air but through the substance of time would
bring her those child-voices, singing for sixpences, and if her heart
wasn't ready to take on quite all the stresses of her mortality and theirs,
at least there was the fear that she was beginning to lose them--that one
winter she would go running to look, out to the gate to find them, run as
far as the trees but in vain, their voices fading. . . .
       It's a long walk home tonight. Listen to the mock-angel singing, let
your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for
your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen. There must have been
evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there
have been nights bad as this one--something to raise the possibility of
another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path
home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our
bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are:  for the one night,
leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw,
almost too frail, there's too much shit in these streets, camels and other
beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him
only another Messiah, and sure somebody's around already taking bets on
that one, while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling
useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping
the foreskinned invanders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear,
just like the innkeepers who're naturally delighted with this registration
thing, and up in the capital they're wondering should they, maybe, give
everybody a _number_, yeah, something to help SPQR Record-keeping . . . and
Heror or Hitler, fellas (the chaplains out in the Bulge are manly, haggard,
hard drinkers), what kind of a world is it ("You forgot Roosevelt, padre,"
come the voices from the back, the good father can never see them, they
harass him, these tempters, even into his dreams:  "Wendell Willkie!" "How
about Churchill?" "'Arry Pollitt!") for a baby to come in tippin' those
Toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin' he's gonna redeem it, why, he oughta
have his head examined. . . .
        But on the way home tonight, you wish you'd picked him up, held him
a bit. Just held him, very close to your heat, his cheek by the hollow of
your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save
him. For the moment anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are.

       O Jesu parvule,
       Nach dir ist mir so we . . .

     So this pickup group, these exiles and horny kids, sullen civilians
called up in their middle age, men fattening despite their hunger,
flatulent because of it, pre-ulcerous, hoarse, runny-nosed, red-eyed,
sore-throated, piss-swollen men suffering from acute lower backs and
all-day hangovers, wishing death on officers they truly hate, men you have
seen on foot and smileless in the cities but forgot, men who don't remember
you either, knowing they ought to be grabbing a little sleep, not out here
performing for strangers, give you this evensong, climaxing now with its
rising fragment of some ancient scale, voices overlapping three- and
fourfold, up, echoing, filling the entire hollow of the church--no
counterfeit baby, no announcement of the Kingdom, not even a try at warming
or lighting this terrible night, only, damn us, our scruffy obligatory
little cry, our maximum readh outward--praise be to God!--for you to take
back to your war-address, your war-identity, across the snow's footprints
and tire tracks finally to the path you must create by yourself, alone in
the dark. Whether you want it or not, whatever seas you have crossed, the
way home. . . .