Stable

The ornaments they made at home from dough,
taut origami stars and paper snowflakes
scissored fresh each year, argued some lack
beside those gauds decking designer trees
such as the absent neighbor’s window framed.
That year the boozy Santa carved in the Black
Forest and the dainty reindeer of Venetian glass—
their flanks aglow with distorting mirrors—gave way

to a 1957 Chevrolet
in aqua resin and an early combat jet,
replicas weighing branchlets down, floating from gold
tethers. Now they had licenses, they drove
to shopping malls; the trove of pleasures swelled
to a remembered mass. That year the children
abandoned the mossy crèche in its pasteboard box;
only some cattle and a Bengal tiger took the air

—toy horde that kids crosslegged on a sweatshop floor
all day in India whittled then lacquered there—
ranged in procession on a table, heading
to no stable. In the dark above their eaves
a train of Canada geese, one year unable
to finish their journey by the solstice, called
to each other in the clouds, circled for bearings,
wheeling and wheeling above the lamplit street.