Theft

Filing out of the family van, we saw snowflakes
could float, dust-like, up from the monochrome
rug that God had unfurled before Maranatha

Baptist Church. There, at eye level,
they kept us for a second from seeing
what we’d driven an hour to see,

a life-sized nativity, its figures arranged
in semicircle, golden, exotic against
the chapel whitescape. I watched

Mother Mary peer into the manger,
her smile aglow in the vesper light,
and caught myself wanting to worship

her just once without blasphemy, the way
Joseph was, staring not down at the baby
but over, into her, with a kind of awe

you can’t condemn. My parents looked so old
and small next to them. Whose life was this size?
Up close, the gold paint was scotched and chipping.

I could see arches and loops and whorls
in the wood grain beneath. It took a while to realize
there was nothing in the trough but powder.