It is warm enough inside, and I can pay
the bills. No one I love is dying (that we manifestly
know); the Huns will not attack, nor Visigoths.
I am oddly consoled that there are no extant dinosaurs.
There might well be, I sometimes think,
so for the freedom from winged, flesh-eating
raptors as I step outside my house I am grateful,
truly.
And you love me, I know you do, you say
it is in your own fashion but it's close enough,
though the cut a style not quite what I ordered.
Almost any love flatters me, my middle-aged figure
notwithstanding, but I am not especially
demanding, glad to be warm enough, to have
paid the bills, glad no one I love is dying,
that we manifestly know.
It is only the Christmas tree, the one I so
belabouredly put up, irritable at the effort,
hoping that it impart a lightness of spirit
I could not muster, myself. And there it sat,
in all its lame glory, fragrant as hope and
bedecked with the hapless decorations which
in other years so amused me: the solemn,
tissue-skirted dancers, hanging by pink threads,
the lanky sheriff pleading, Rudolph with your nose
so bright, won't you shoot my wife tonight,
the Christmas shark, and the golden glittered mask of the
sun's rays, fit for a face much smaller than my own.
I amuse myself in my ironic preoccupations,
and do not care much whether others feel likewise.
Who besides me really looks at that tree, anyhow?
It is only that it is now long past a Christmas I did
not love, was not grateful for, could not resurrect
the spirit for, and I am sad for the tree which I
did not love, as I should have, as I might have,
had it not, perhaps, been so warm inside, had
not the bills been paid.