41 Advent There’s a savageness to your sadness, as I’m sure there was for a scribe who loved illumination enough to suffer each flourish. December’s clockwork interlocks around a bookish sun as I watch you tend to the marginalia your hair makes around you. And though I’d like one to, no leaf throughout recorded history has ever rejoined its tree. The trees, for their part, shake their nightmares to the ground. True, the finality of calendars still startles us, caught in our own largesse. And it’s too easy to say language loves the most meager of feudal riches, December’s needles a compass mortuary. It would be the same to say each button on your down jacket is a rune waiting to be discovered, ruined, rediscovered, which to some scribe was reason enough for the opulence of a fossil moon. We might reinvent the moon as what our tragic fire aspires to: a hole in all this sullied constancy. Because no fire cleanses itself without first dying, which is why we utter warmth: not fire but the end of fire. ...