Herding Reindeer I felt my way in the dark as daylight did in my dream across bare limbs, through twigs, across the roof of our backdoor neighbors’, rustling as though with bony fingers before it suddenly blared as though it gripped a trumpet of sun, and woke me up. The room was twice again as dark as at bedtime. I felt my way downstairs. Lights red and yellow, orange, green, and blue— I switch them on. Under the tree the presents, few. (Our daughter, whose home is away, grew up in a twinkling.) My gaze settles awhile on one, its corner gnawed by the dog, whose toys must be too few— a Nylabone, a red Kong Goodie Bone, one treat still in, a red-tongued blue and yellow braid (a frayed dragon of rope) all there in the foyer—then winds, my gaze does, upward: bears and horses, deer and doves. The bears, it’s true, wear mufflers and sit as toddlers do, legs out, except for a polar bear, which strides, and, true, the deer have collars on with bells and there’s a host of Santas; still, it is as though, within this room’s four walls of books, the night, its many star fields, bent, broke into swirls of color, the constellations multiplied, filled out, with bodies became as angels whom you can wrestle or cuddle. My gaze rests on the one, a blonde in silver and gold brocade, the trumpeter crowning the tree; my mind’s eye pierces the ceiling. Stars— there are none knotting together a living thing. That rustle— the black dog, twitching, dreams of herding. A prospect dawns: a field of arctic blue with reindeer as white as the snowflakes— no angel she indwelling. My wife in her flannel nightshirt, who has a cold and snores herself awake.   David Havird

David Havird is the author of two collections: Map Home (2013) and Penelope’s Design (2010), which won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. He has new poems (and articles) in recent or forthcoming issues of The Hopkins Review, Literary Imagination, Literary Matters, and Nostos. He teaches at Centenary College of Louisiana.