Holiday Cards

Scuffing through the kitchen, I stopped 
to right a slanted card 
slipping, as it was, under gravity and magnet. 
I pulled its corner to a wrinkle-black space, an open patch 
among the others, the red and green and gold 
and seasoned blend of photograph-news: a baby 
curling into its breath, scraps of gilded glass, a vacancy 
on the stair-step where a mother once laughed 
beside a couch-full of pajamaed children smiling.

I was once a child smiling, once 
a pajamaed child among a throng of children, our voices 
glistening like a host of birds 
tapping and prodding the pale-pink sky 
to wake, to rise.
 
But my stair-step is vacant too. 
Not one but many lost 
to time and discord and a waning 
sun, which may yet glow under the earth 
but I don’t see it, so busy am I 
tucking meaning into 
the folds of my hands, the corners 
of my eyes, the soles of my 
faded leather boots.