The Trumpiad
Epiphany
​
January 6, 2021
Lexington, Massachusetts
​
He inquired of them where the Christ was to be born.
Matthew 2:4
​
Not until I went to bed did I remember
what day it was.
That afternoon you and I walked
near Punkatassett ("Broad Topped Hill")
just north of where the jail
Thoreau spent a night in
used to stand.
We walked with our masks down,
through woods empty enough of human forms
to seem a pre-pandemic wilderness.
Our breaths, conspiring,
vanished in the cold.
Ponds and marshlands emerged
among the bare trunks of beech and oak.
The remnants of low stone walls
still obeying their builders' first intentions
drew near, then veered off
on tangents bewildering to living eyes.
They told us how the settlers who drove out
the Natick (first namers, burners of woodland)
kept cows from straying into sinkholes
hidden in the shadows. Also, separated
"ours" from "yours."
If there were any predators
waiting out the prematurely fading light,
we guessed they'd emerge at nightfall to resume
their silent, fatal journey
irrespective of walls,
under star-glimmer.
It's easy to lose your way here,
where tall trees, over years,
have replaced charred meadows,
and trails and cart-tracks disobey
the compass rose's rigid dicta,
surrendering to the waywardness of human traffic
like stones in a wall to gravity.
My satellite app showed us, from any adjustable sublunary distance,
our position in the world to the fraction of a minute,
and where,
pinned on the maze of paths enmeshing
frozen pools and pits of hollow ice pierced with dry, broken reeds,
we were to turn. But not of
the renegade bear or spotted bobcat or coyote
wandering by day.
These hills forget their history.
Road signs remember for them:
our return to Lexington
reversed the path the Bedford Minutemen took
to the Old North Bridge.
It was nearly dark by the time we walked in the door.
Checking your phone you said,
"Something's happened."
On the little screen, people clinging to the Capitol façade.
Flags on the Hill. A Confederate flag.
Murmurs of a crowd under cloudy skies.
A bare-chested man wearing horns and a coonskin cap.
That evening we ate in front of the television,
just like when my family used to watch
Bonanza and Davy Crocket—our History Channel.
A woman dead.
Officers wounded.
Tear gas.
The National Guard marching off the screen.
Inside, someone with a video feed walking down a ransacked
hall to the Senate chamber, where deliberations
would resume.
We went to bed well before they ended
where everyone expected when we set out
for Punkatasset.
Lying in the dark, I asked myself,
Is this, at last, the step too far?
"See!"
See what?
My righteousness reached out to grab
lapels of empty air.
That's when I remembered what day it was.
Feast of "what's beyond"—
hidden, past understanding—"made
apparent,"
manifest to the senses
if not to sense.
The day the Magi make it across the living room
to the stable under the tree, the day a traveling star
reveals the promise of salvation,
Messiah of the Chosen People,
to the Unchosen. The day
a jealous king asks where to send his men
and ends up killing innocents.
Holy infant, tender and mild,
so unlike what the pagans led us to expect:
Zeus, an incinerating flash,
Dionysus, who made Agave his puppet to tear
Pentheus, her son, limb from limb
for refusing him worship.
Agave, mother
brought to her senses by Cadmus,
who told her to look at the sky
and then at what she held in her hands.
Brought to her senses, and to sorrow--
like the mother of Jesus, like all mothers,
eventually.
That's the trouble with epiphanies: we keep
praying for a savior and keep getting
kings—Infant Kings, Philosopher Kings, Kings of Kings.
Why do the nations pray
for a god to descend?
Remember Agave.
​
As for what the Fathers wanted, how could they know?
Any more than Joseph (kneeling with the shepherds,
just another onlooker) could know
how this Son of Man he hoped to make
a builder of beds and roof-beams,
would stray into so different a road,
up to a broad topped hill
and a tree on which the hammerer
would be nailed?
How can anyone know?
It’s just your imagined nation.
Consent of the governed?
No oracle of entrails or bird flight can tell us.
Just a Ouija board
with 159,000,000 fingers resting
on a planchette
shaped
like a tear-drop,
a monocular eye scanning the alphabet
for binocular depths of meaning,
pushed here and there from no beyond
but from everywhere in
the flat here and now. A fiction
made fact by an act of legerdemain
we agree to take
for miracle.
Willingly, and in no other way,
must we suspend our disbelief.
A poet said this. Another, wandering in exile, sang
of a white rose, its petals unfurled in worship
unvarying and incessant around
the Transhuman.
Love drives us toward it.
Its element is fire—the one that rises
and burns
to be among the stars.
But even poets get it wrong sometimes.
Suspending disbelief is like holding your breath:
eventually, you gasp for air.
And Dante planted his rose in a lake of ice,
whose human forms, each visible
"as a straw in glass" beneath
the frozen surface,
were, when living, the only reeds love
knew how to play—
little epiphanies of love,
and envy and greed
and anger.
You won't get the impurities out
unless you throw out the love with them
and freeze it to death.
That night the Mystic Rose seemed as brittle
as a blossom dipped in liquid nitrogen.
I waited for a sign.
The atomic clock cast its numerals on the ceiling.
Listening to the whisper of satellites,
they told me the time for things to happen
was past.
They told me
I should have been asleep.
Your breathing, too.
Closing my eyes, I pictured how,
from a sky where satellites
take the place of stars, this dark earth
might look as if it knew something,
like a diamonded bride arrayed in slender,
glowing strands
that somehow arrive at gatherings of light.
Your breathing, near.
​
​
NOTE:
​
In the Christian calendar, January is the month of the Epiphany--January 6th, to be precise. That's the day the Three Kings are said to have appeared in Bethlehem with gifts for the baby Jesus, who was then just twelve days old. In our place and time, January 6th is also the day when, every four years, America's elected representatives meet to ratify the results of the Presidential election held two months before, and the anniversary of what was, up to then, the most shameful episode in the history of our country's presidential elections. I say "up to then" for reasons that to any loyal American citizen with half a brain will appear to be self-evident.
"Epiphany" was written in the immediate aftermath of that infamous event and originally published in the first issue of Sympos. We can now see that the attack on our nation's Capitol was only an ominous harbinger of greater outrages to come. In anticipation of more of the same, I plan to include it as "Poem of the Month" in every January issue for the foreseeable future, at least until the end of the current Presidential administration makes it no longer relevant.
The Peculiar Man
I never met a more peculiar man than Donald Trump.
A man who wears unlikely hair inflated with a pump.
A man who lies but thinks he's wise because, for him, a thought
Is something not to welcome in, but something to be fought.
A man who sees his pieties reflected in the stare
Of multitudes with mirrors showing he's not really there.
A man who doesn't give, but takes--and takes and takes and takes.
A man who bullies moms and kids to make his Country Great,
Who chopped the Tree of Liberty down flat, but left a stump
On which he could relieve himself and sometimes take a dump--
I never met a more peculiar man than Donald Trump.
On the phone I ask my brother
"After Pro-Trump Mob Storms Capitol, Congress Confirms Biden Win"
--The New York Times, January 7, 2021
On the phone I ask my brother
if the storming of the Capitol affected him or his family,
out there in Rockville.
Not him, he says, but his daughter lives
not far from the White House.
Antifa agitators.
And we are into it: ballots
in boxcars,
the whatabouts.
And as we get farther into it
the path we're on rises and narrows
and my brother's voice begins to step
on the heels of my replies before I
can take
my second stride
and his laugh that says, "I've heard that
before!" overtakes my sentences,
redirecting them
with a glancing shove—
and something floats free,
like tear gas blown back,
a wavering note,
thinning out, shaking
with desperation to be heard—trumpet
of a prophecy turning to clown horn as he speaks,
urgent with the catch and click
of panic in the dreamer's song
as he realizes,
not for the first time, perhaps,
that no one can hear his voice.
When he stops to catch his breath
I point toward more familiar topics,
like heat pumps
and electric cars.
In the flat valleys they inhabit
we can listen to the same river,
and the road next to it is wide enough
for walking side by side.
I let my brother, the radar engineer,
hold the map that tells us
where we're going.
Not back home. No way home—no one there
to greet us anyway.
​
​
​
​
​
Garlic Mustard
"And some, I assume, are good people.”
--Donald J. Trump
The 6:35 bus to Alewife is late,
so I have time to listen to
the garlic mustard.
Every spring the warnings appear
from the DPW and the conservation groups:
“Again this year insidious garlic mustard
will invade Lexington.”
You can’t mow it.
You can’t compost it.
You can’t build a wall
to keep it out.
Those invisible seeds!
Here at the bus stop
the invaders gather under the scrub privet
with the candy wrappers and the soggy plastic bags.
There they tower like exiled
aristocrats. I listen to them whispering
in conspiratorial
flowers small and white,
four petals like speech-balloons
at the top of each slender,
stately stalk.
I recall their delicate scent,
released at each deracination,
but undetected
until you bend to smell it.
When the bus arrives,
the garlic mustard continues muttering
as if to persuade me
it didn’t know I was listening.
At stop after stop I see
its huddled, elevated
conversations.
Call it a Light
--November 9, 2016
The glaziers call it a light,
I call it
a pane.
One of six, two by three,
each caulked snugly in its little frame,
indifferent to its neighbors
in the side door to the garage.
I found it this morning.
When it was broken, and how,
who knows?
I must have passed it a thousand times,
perhaps even opened the door to fetch
a rake,
the pruning shears,
a fungicide to spray the brown spots
on the mountain laurel,
and missed that horn-shaped splinter
of darkness.
This morning on my way to start the car
I noticed it.
Was it because I’d decided
to stop not thinking about
the world, to stop
conversing with the dead poets—to turn off
the white noise that,
like a blanket of snow,
had muffled the sharp edges
of this new, granite upland?
Now, like the boom of trucks,
the world stood forth, swept naked in the gale,
its protruding rocks
too steep to climb
and islanded by deep piles of dead leaves—
too deep, I fear, to stand in.
That broken pane.
What might get in?
Rain. Snow.
Or birds (or bats!)
with their nests
and droppings dripping liquid siftings
all over my nice tools.
Making a mess
in the tidiness
of my dark interior.
I peered in,
and listened.
Nothing.
Then I opened the door and something flew out
too fast for me to see.
Line Dancing
--"Young voters helped put Biden in the White House.
Now they want action."
The Boston Globe, January 21, 2021
Welcome to the dance, kids!
Get in line.
It's three steps forward,
And two behind.
A Marathon Dance,
Not a Friday Night Hop,
So pay at the door
And dance 'til you drop.
Don't ever let up,
Or they'll change the track
To two steps forward,
And three steps back.