Christmas In July Poem by Andrew Dabar

An octave of blackbirds
Handsome quarter notes
Minus one that flew away
Leaves a treble clef of power lines
Unresolved and incomplete
A yawn uncaught
Ruffling the feathers of some
Flagging their wings
Changing and reducing their value
Splitting four of them down to 256th notes
The smallest fraction of musical notation
Quarks of melody barely heard and rarely seen
Demisemihemidemisemiquavers
According to British musicians
So that now
Only three remain on the bottom line of the staff
Three solid single beats of E
No DO or RE
Only MI
Same pitch
Side-by-side
Enough to start a happy song
MI MI MI (me, me, me)
Jingle Bells
The first song played in outer space
Originally entitled
The One Horse Open Sleigh
A Thanksgiving song
Not a Christmas song
Or a college drinking song
Or a birdsong
A Thanksgiving song
Written and composed by James Lord Pierpont
For his Sunday school class in 1850
Celebrating annual sleigh races
In and around Medford, Massachusetts
I am pondering all of these things
(Wondering as I wander if the good church folk placed bets on their jingle horses)
After a generous splash of gin in my Earl Grey
Entranced
Beguiled by birds
When a snot green Buick lays hard on a screaming horn
Beeeeeeeep!
Startling me out of my skin
Shooting my hands into the air
(An embarrassing moro reflex which supposedly disappears after infancy unless there is an imbalance in the adult brain)
Window rolls down
Base voice bumpkin bellows
Cigarette bounces on moving lips
Untapped ash begins to snow
"Git outta the road ya dummy, God bless ya
You gonna git yerself keeled! "
Now
O're the fields [I] go
Laughing all the way
——————-
Andrew Dabar