The electronic bird calls of the blind 
crossing signals carol the Christmas tree 
guy-wired to the hardwoods in the center 
of Center City: a misshapen dowager 
of a spruce bespangled in rumpled rows 
of colored lights, her tiara star askew.  
In her heyday Wilkes-Barre had been 
the Diamond City, black diamonds 
of anthracite coal.   Over time oil and gas 
siphoned off much of coal’s kingdom 
but it was the Knox Mine disaster 
of 1959 that sealed things.  
 
Are we surprised to hear how old
the story is, how often we repeat ourselves?
Mine officials sent the miners down to burrow 
illegally beneath the Susquehanna.  
When the riverbed caved in it took three days 
of jamming railroad cars, culm, whatever debris 
came to hand into the voracious whirlpool that opened 
before the wound could be staunched but by then 
twelve miners, and the fortunes of Wilkes-Barre, 
had been swept into the web of mines now irrevocably 
plugged by ten billion gallons of river water.  
O Shepherds, o silent night, beneath this tree, 
in the hollowed-out heart of one more 
once-prosperous American city, as evening 
settles into night, a lone policeman 
in his idling patrol car watches
wreathed in silvery exhaust.

A wood stove reminds you
what it is you have
brought into the home 
each time you unlatch 
the door and thrust the dead 
weight bundle of a log 
into the roil 
of that indifferent heart.
 
Backing out of the drive 
on some errand or another you 
look back to the house and hope  
to read reassurance in the blue 
whistle of smoke the chimney exhales, 
but carry the gnaw of worry 
with you nonetheless:
 
in your mind the house 
could already be engulfed, 
the fire poised in that critical instant 
of barbaric elegance 
when the flame shapes to the fuel 
it is consuming, the house transfigured 
to a construct of lurid light,                  
the very image of your losses.
 
That imagined radiance compels
the mind far beyond any 
refutations you can invent
fueled by the certainty that 
                      
time is the flame
 
and no one ever          
returns to the home they left.

I didn’t even know any photographs survived of that trip
but here’s one of those oddly-shaped snaps
Mémère’s Brownie box camera used to take:
the five of us lined up awkwardly, not quite
touching, individually squinting 
into the Florida sun.  
 
What strikes me is the sheer bulk 
of the four near-grown children.
Centered among us, our father looks
diminished, a forty-seven-year-old man 
who has brought his children home
to his mother’s house for Christmas.
 
His tender smallness under the stark
blue of that southern sky recalls to me
four months before the photograph was taken:
 
the five of us waiting 
in the church vestibule behind 
the sleek mahogany of my mother’s coffin,
so small, so tender
even a sixteen-year-old had sense enough
to step up and take his hand
for the long walk down the aisle.