The Twelve Poems of Christmas - Poem Five

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The Tow Truck Driver's Story

You meet all kinds of people in this work.
You have to be polite, twenty-four hours
a day. It was a brutal winter night,
I'd worked since four a.m., finally coming in
to sleep when the phone rang, a guy calling
from up on Appleton ridge, saying
he needs a jump. I asked, "Can't it wait?
There's still snow on the roads, the plows aren't
All through. It'll take me three hours at least
to get there with the roads like this." "Ok,"
he said, "I'll wait." I went to bed an hour,
before he called, "It's an emergency."
The storm had eased as I headed out,
But the wind had been so bad, I had
To stop and climb over the drifts to knock
the snow off signs to see where to go,
a hard dark climb up to Appleton Ridge.
Over three hours to get to a lonely
country farmhouse, light glowing brightly.
Then a man in, I kid you not, a red
Satin smoking jacket comes out and waves.
I think he's waving to me, and wave back,
But it's a garage opener and out of the dark
A door rises, lit like a museum,
A car, glittering white and chrome beauty,
It was a 1954 Mercedes.
A Gull-Wing. You ever heard of them?
I think they only made ten of them.
Its doors lift up like a gull in flight.
I bet it was worth a million dollars.
I ask, "Are you going to take that out?"
"Oh, no, we just got back from Jamaica
I want a jump to make sure it's ok."
It starts like a dream, purrs dangerously.
"Oh good," he says and walks away, waving
his arm to close the door, never saying
a word, left me standing there in the snow.

by Elizabeth W. Garber
from The Mayor and Other Stories of Small Town Life © The Illuminated Sea Press, 2007.
Courtesy of The Writer's Almanac

The Twelve Poems of Christmas - Poem Four

Click on the title to listen to the poet read his work.

A Slice of Wedding Cake

Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls
Married impossible men?
Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,
And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.

Repeat 'impossible men': not merely rustic,
Foul-tempered or depraved
(Dramatic foils chosen to show the world
How well women behave, and always have behaved).

Impossible men: idle, illiterate,
Self-pitying, dirty, sly,
For whose appearance even in City parks
Excuses must be made to casual passers-by.

Has God's supply of tolerable husbands
Fallen, in fact, so low?
Or do I always over-value woman
At the expense of man?
Do I?
It might be so.

by Robert Graves

courtesy of poets. org

Poem Three in the Twelve Poems of Christmas

Latin Lessons

The daughter of the local florist taught
us Latin in the seventh grade. We sat
like hothouse flowers nodding in a mist
of conjugations, declining nouns that
made little sense and adjectives that missed
the point. She was elegant, shapely, taut.
She was dazzling and classic, a perfect
example to us of such absolute
adjectives as unique or ideal or perfect.
The room held light. Suffering from acute
puberty, we could still learn case by case
to translate with her from the ancient tongue
by looking past her body to the chaste
scribblings she left on the board. We were young
but knew that the ablative absolute
was not the last word in being a part
of something while feeling ourselves apart
from everything that mattered most. We chased
each other on the ballfield after class
though it did no good. What we caught was not
what we were after, no matter how fast
we ran. She first got sick in early fall.
A change in her voice, a flicker of pain
across her face, and nothing was the same.
She came back to us pale and more slender
than ever, a phantom orchid in strong
wind, correcting our pronoun and gender
agreement, verb tense, going over all
we had forgotten while she was gone. Long
before she left for good in early spring,
she made sure the dead language would remain
alive inside us like a buried spring.


by Floyd Skloot
from The End of Dreams. © Louisiana State University Press.
courtesy of The Writer's Almanac

The Second Poetry Day of Christmas

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

by Robert Hayden

Remember, if you have a poem to share, I'd love to hear it!

The Twelve Poems of Christmas - Poem One

blessing the boats

(at St. Mary's)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that


by Lucille Clifton
From Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 by Lucille Clifton. Copyright © 2001 by Lucille Clifton. Courtesy of poets.org

Ode to a Fickle Nuthatch

Because it's a cool poem....
With thanks to The Writer's Almanac.


Winter and the Nuthatch

Once or twice and maybe again, who knows,
the timid nuthatch will come to me
if I stand still, with something good to eat in my hand.
The first time he did it
he landed smack on his belly, as though
the legs wouldn't cooperate. The next time
he was bolder. Then he became absolutely
wild about those walnuts.

But there was a morning I came late and, guess what,
the nuthatch was flying into a stranger's hand.
To speak plainly, I felt betrayed.
I wanted to say: Mister,
that nuthatch and I have a relationship.
It took hours of standing in the snow
before he would drop from the tree and trust my fingers.
But I didn't say anything.
Nobody owns the sky or the trees.
Nobody owns the hearts of birds.
Still, being human and partial therefore to my own
successes —
though not resentful of others fashioning theirs —

I'll come tomorrow, I believe, quite early.

by Mary Oliver
from Red Bird. © Beacon Press, 2008

Climbing Back on the Horse — er, Saddle — er....

Had you told me six months ago that I'd have taken half the year off running, I'd have laughed aloud. I was, at that time, in rare form: running an easy five miles a day with occasional weightlifting, looking forward to running through Central Park on my honeymoon.

And then I stepped off a curb.

Then — well, I can't even figure that out, still. Suffice it to say that one doesn't know how to explain a hole in an intestine, even if it runs in the family.

But that's all just horrifying stories that publishers would warn me against because "no one would believe it." (And they wouldn't.) Now I'm trying to get back to where I was six months ago.

Did I mention that it hurts?

Not in that "Oh, please, sweet mother of heaven, let me die and I promise I won't be any trouble to you" way. Been there, done that, didn't even keep the t-shirt.

No, this is more of a "Oh, so that's what that muscle does!" kind of pain. I remember taking a couple of weeks off back in the early aughts when I had some shoulder repairs done. It was hard to start again and my muscles rebelled.

Now, imagine that a dozen times worse.

I don't have my excellent lung capacity anymore. I get a little winded walking up the stairs, much to my surprise. My resting pulse rate and blood pressure are still good, though, so I am not going to die at the gym — but I may feel like it. And I won't like it.

Now, I am not going to throw myself into an exercise program that's too ambitious; convalescence is still too fresh in my mind to make me do something that might reverse my healing. I am not fragile, but I am cautious.

So, if you see me working away with a grimace on one of the elliptical machines at the gym, just let me be. I'll be cheerful again in no time.

I know I will start to appreciate that one-mile run, where suiting up takes longer than the actual experience of running, when it becomes two. Or three. (You get the gist.) And you'll see me on the road only when it's warm enough — I'm not yet running in the sub-freezing winter dawn. I may be crazy, but I'm not yet completely certifiable!