HAPPY HOLIDAYS

Milk-Light Vigil

Mother, I am apprenticing myself to the liturgy of threshold, how a wreath becomes portal, how conifers bear their resinous devotion toward the longest night. In the frozen world, a man selects his constellation with reverence, this verdant offering that will anchor our solstice vigil.

We domesticate wilderness and name it reprieve. The ornament remembers its cradling, passed palm to palm like an heirloom incantation. The lace remembers hands that tutored other hands, thus we alchemise the ephemeral into a continuum. Somewhere a vessel bears its cartography of feasts, each gathering a small eternity before the greater stillness arrives. The tapers are hours counting down, flames like the primordial syllable we whisper into darkness: soon, soon, soon. I press my palm to gesso, to figures in their plastered eternities keeping watch beside us, and feel the accumulated warmth of all who paused here before me.

What is this eve but sediment of longing made luminous? What is this suspended hour but an extended interval into which we place our most burnished anticipation? The textile genuflects in readiness. The amulet suspends between breath and breath. Even quietude hums with imminence. And there, inscribed in the final light: pause, the most sacred instruction we inherit. Behold: everything arranged for the arrival of nothing but ourselves, present, held by this altar of attention.