December 5
The First Week in Advent

I find a rag lying in the leaves far back of the house.    In the garage, a plastic penguin is stuffed onto a shelf, next to a wooden crucifix.   A wall beam is lined with jars of nails, windshield washer fluid, a broken oil lamp, and a lone work glove, waiting for its match to be found.   It is the same everywhere.  My desk is littered with ancient artifacts:  a mug full of pens, a dish of horse chestnuts, a handful of heart-shaped stones, a torn photo of my great uncle.  On the radiator lies a barrel-makers tool, passed on to me by my father, who tells me that his grandfather was one of the last and best barrel-makers West of the Mississippi.   But what is it to me?   What can I do with such a thing in my life?

I think of William Butler Yeats' attempt to describe the origin of the poet's greatest visions, or our humanity's best dreams.    We keep going back to the "foul rag and bone shop of the heart."    All of us are a synthesis of old rags and bones:  the fragments of childhood memories and yearnings, the familiar tastes and smells that set our hearts thumping, the filaments of DNA or family stories that go back far beyond our recollection.  Even the foulest pieces of our lives--the old hurts and disappointments, the failures and frustrations--are stirred into the cauldron where something new, hopeful, healing may emerge.
Advent is full of rags and bones, turned into a story of an unplanned homeless child wrapped in swaddling cloth.   I know how that story ended.  But I wait, still, to see what will come of my rags and bones.

Rags and Bones

I am rags and bones,
the remnants of years.
I do not understand why
I keep the drawer of letters,
the pins and stones
gathered like a cairn
on my heart's landscape.
A cooper's tool, rusty with age,
claims my loyalty,
as if a hand from another world
offers it against some unseen need
for some mysterious, holy task.
I am scar and wound,
a creature limping to some fearful destiny.
I am left to lie among the leaves,
a woven cloth, waiting to be found.
And you are the one
who comes--
a wind, a breath, a dream--
to find me, to find us all,
and give a birth.

--Timothy Haut, December 5, 2013