Alan Walowitz

Comfort and Joy

The solstice, as predicted: chill wind; bitter sun;

the temperature falling like a glove

belies all the talk of the world dying of the heat.

Most will make it to the far side of winter,

no matter what the Mayans might claim:

the world soon coming to an end.

Compared to their workaday miracles these Mayan ladies perform--

toileting my mother, changing her, putting on lipstick--

it hardly matters the brutality that went on

atop Chichen Itza, solstice so long ago.

 

Joy to the World and all is forgiven,

we hear from the desperate, the sick-at-heart,

but what’s all such idle saying worth?

A song pitched too high, even for the cherubim?

A so-called virgin birth--the agony without

the earlier pleasure that might serve to redeem?

It’ll be cold enough in the grave with or without,

but how about we try a winter coat?

 

I know my mother is tired of all this incessant being.

When she taps her tongue to her palate just so,

gets the neurons to fire in proper sequence,

and those stubborn synapses to bridge,

she tells me, No good! No good!

Maybe the Mayans are keeping it

too hot in here, too much like the Yucatan:

I start to think, in desperation, it might be cooler underground.

Es la vida, one of the señoras tells me

when I cry from this cold thought I now regret thinking.

Que lastima, niño!--she pities me

my weakness, my child-like honesty,

but offers no substitute, no shoulder to cry upon,

no lap to cradle me my wounds.

 

original version first appeared in The Ekphrastic Review

 

Christmas at the Yoga Retreat

No holly, no lights, only the tree outside, lonely, unadorned,

but come to full term with the help of some higher power

which saved it from man’s need to turn trees into monuments

to whomever he turns when life is at low ebb.

For a moment now, it’s decorated with a winter bird or two,

and some orphan-snow in the crotch of a branch,

but we’re just a few days the other side of the solstice,

and the mothership, this creaky scow of ours, seems to be stuck on a sandbar

as it tries to right itself and chug a new path through the multiverse.

Now we can’t see much through the growing dark,

though those who study  the calendar assure us there’s some hope ahead--

and it just so happens:  Should we chuck it all  for the sake of meditation?

becomes the very subject of tonight’s meditation.

Our leader tells us, This is the last full moon there’ll be on Christmas . . .

and then, looking around at our mostly aging crew

formed in an expectant circle, blurts this accidental truth:  . . . in some of our lifetimes. 

The way our days insist on crashing so predictably to their end 

seldom gets spoken in Canyon Ranch or Parrot Cay, those tonier joints

where more room will soon be needed for advanced yoga poses

by the young and lithe Brahmin--and where we tell ourselves

we have no intention of spending the last few shekels of our bounty,

much less the frankincense and myrrh, left from our previous incarnations,

we keep stashed, against bad tidings, in our underwear drawer.

 

originally appeared in Exactly Like Love published by Osedax Press