Royal Magic

Carolers in Placerville

—Poems and Photos by Taylor Graham, Placerville, CA

CHRISTMAS AT THE RAUHE HAUS
    based on Elihu Burritt’s “Christmas in Germany” (c. 1850)

A home for homeless children—ne’er-do-wells 


from a Dickens novel, petty thieves 


and pickpockets if not murderers; boys handy 


with cudgel and knife; girls just as bad.

But for Christmas these urchins invited 


the whole town to help them celebrate. Rich 


folks arrive by carriage to sit on hard benches 


in a chapel the children built by hand.

The Christmas tree’s alight with tapers. 


And who sits at the table of honor with a linen 


cloth? The poorest of the poor, the lamest 


of the lame from hovels, hedges, and highways.

Their hosts, children saved from the ditch


and raised with love and learning, who share 


hand-baked bread, hand-knit stockings, 


cobbled shoes—the Christmas joy of their hands.

THE CHRISTMAS NUGGET

December 25th, 1849.
The miners came from far and wide—
from Georgetown, Dark Canyon, Georgia
Slide, Oregon Canyon, the other Gold Bug.
They came to Canyon Creek not bearing
gifts, but to see the great golden
gift as if from heaven.
Bill Wilson had struck it rich.
A twelve-pound nugget!
They lined up outside the cabin, waiting
their turn. Only a few at a time
were let inside to see the marvel. The early
arrivals came out smiling, shaking their heads,
saying it was well worth the trip
to see such a thing.
A hard life was the miner’s, and Christmas
a time to celebrate, to rejoice.
Each miner in turn admired Bill Wilson’s
12-pound nugget—
a healthy newborn baby boy.
Each miner left the cabin smiling,
keeping the secret—the joke, if you will—
from miners still in line.
Each left that cabin richer, Christmas-
gifted.

WITCHING HOURS

He walks his land, summoning
secrets subterranean with a rough-cut
stick, as if witching for water in drought,
or trailing the westward path of day-
light across surfaces; not counting retail
ticks of the clock but noting variations day
to day—rock-slow journey of a hillside
boulder charmed by gravity or wanderlust
incrementally down the slope. Nothing
stays the same. At end of day,
from his deck he surveys a landscape
of moonlit dips and hummocks,
all the quilted layers bedded down,
cocooned for morning.

LIBRARY AFTER-HOURS

Step inside this cocoon of learning.
It’s dark and cold. Shine your flashlight

along the shelves of titles. We’re Coming
into the Country through Solomon’s Ring,

a land of Panakeia. Here are Nests, Eggs,
and Nestlings and a Manual of the Flowering

Plants of California. Here are Stories
I Like to Tell according to The Old Farmer’s

Almanac. Tonight we’ll be Fooling
with Words all along the Bluebird Trails.

Here among the pages we speak
The Language of Life.

O ROYAL,

my mother’s old manual portable,
how her fingers raced your keys faster than I
could polka. You love determined fingers.
Across the ocean in my suitcase,
a study-year in Freiburg—I’d add
the umlauts by hand with a pen.

Do they call you obsolete? I can
count on your typewritten line. Not like
words tapped on my laptop’s soft keys till
Kitten Latches comes prancing along—
a paw-stroke I can’t recover from,
a string of bbbbbs.

O Royal, you travel time and space—
a borrowed table & chair, Main Street,
composing on request of strangers.
Personal poems, one of a kind
ink on paper with no Command-C;
not to be lost to cyberspace by
mistake of a keystroke. How two eyes
of a stranger look up from your type-
written page with that human glow.
You’re magic.

PETAL AND STONE
      on a painting by Utagawa Hiroshige II
 
Remember when caterpillar disappeared
from milkweed? he asks. Snug
in cocoon, she answers, and by summer
a Monarch fluttered the garden.

Are they lovers, or just friends?
these two finding a pathway between
April’s brief cherry blossoming
and distant, eternal mountain cocooned

in snow; man and woman between
petal and stone walking a bank
of Time’s river, last winter’s snow-
melt bursting in pink bloom.

Today’s LittleNip:

AFTER THE FIRE, WHAT REMAINS
—Taylor Graham

Neighborhoods a dead moonscape with   
soft protective layer of ash, an
abandoned car’s burned shell, empty
space with no living soul. Gray dishpan
after the last supper, an ever-swinging
metal gate at a dead-end street, but with one
gray-muzzled dog, alive, guarding to the end.

___________________

Our thanks to Taylor Graham for some wonderful pre-Christmas cheer, and a reminder that Third Thursdays at the Central Library will take place today at noon in the Sacramento Room at 828 I St., Sacramento. Scroll down to the blue column (under the green column at the right) for info about this and other upcoming poetry events in our area—and note that more may be added at the last minute.

—Medusa

 Cherry Blossoms at Koganei in the Eastern Capital
—Painting by Utagawa Hiroshige II, 1826-1869
(Celebrate poetry!)

Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.