A Christmas Universe

For Charlotte

This year you’ve grown too old for anagrams,
that devil’s name within a Santa hat.
You tell me that you have no need of things
or wishes that you’ll later learn to curse:
the Midas touch, the genii trickster’s lamp
are all behind you.

Oranges, or nuts that you can crack,
chocolate in a stocking by the fire
that you can race to eat before it melts,
that you can suck before the juice runs dry,
that you can squeeze to crack, to break the shell.
A tiny space, a place before the fire,
to have in any order you desire.
It’s all you ask.

We sit here, Boxing Day, pyjama clad,
honour silence, nurse a Christmas cold.
Inside our hamlet there’s a universe,
a tardis world that grows in cottage walls
where dreams are birthsongs dancing out a flame,
licking coal to life.

You sit squashed up with Tigger on a seat,
read ‘Lord of the Rings’ time and again.
And in his head your Tigger softly says,
‘At fifteen years my friend still loves to bounce.
She springs from tale to tale, from spring
to spring.’

I’m curled up in an armchair with this book
writing out a story for myself, feeling like the Pooh-bear
with no brain. Wondering how P-branes intersect to form black holes.
My thoughts are Christmas ribbons tied in knots, discarded labels
from the day before, hiding in a black bag by the door.
I tap, unwrap a chocolate from its box,
so we can suck each segment
and not speak.

We wonder why the gentle snowflake falls,
solves, dissolves its secrets on our tongues:

Put a mirror in the middle of the water in the walls,
the Christmas birth canal is much too thin a line to carry us.

Some nuts, it seems, are much too tough to crack
in the small time we are lent in holidays.

Julie Boden