And Yet

Yet

for Annamaria

 

I wake beside a hunk of concrete

angled up to a frenzied freeway

where platoons of scooters, trucks

and cars roar insatiably all night long

 

but they particularly steal my ears

this morning of Christmas Eve.

In Gaoxiong’s soupy skies

at night the moon is only visible

 

occasionally, but I know it’s there;

moonbeams, moonshine, claire de lune:

all its meanings sound corny

and are given by us, but then

 

can be reflected back, just as

science says its light is reflection,

mere reflection. In America

a man rants in a department store

 

“Stop lying to your kids!”

“There is no Santa Claus!”

yet the kids queuing for Santa

ignore his voice. He can’t tell

 

how lies differ from fantasy

or the magic in their world

that his flattening realism

will never dispel, the wonder

 

of dream. In a season  of good cheer

a killer hurtles a truck

into a Berlin Christmas markt,

Melbourne men plan murder

 

in the venerable name of God. Yet

in Gaoxiong’s deeply Chinese streets

carols play, electric trees

twinkle: Christmas is spreading.

 

This Christmas, half a world

away from you, I will look up

and, cloudlessness or clouds,

will see the moon is there

 

and by some process I don’t pretend

to understand, or will ever,

I feel, though too far off

you are yet almost beside me

 

and that corny, reflecting moon

will spread its determined light

on us both.