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NavidadLuces.jpg
NavidadLuces.jpg

Mixed PoMo Xmas Blues

while Surfing FB

NativityPPFrancesca.jpg

for Marcel Antonio

 

 

The Spirit was insistent 

when I saw the PAL video 

showing foreigners singing 

Kumukutikutitap! 

their tongues twisting 

I posted it on my own page 

and tagged my kids in Colorado 

to ask what they thought—

“Nice but a bit awkward,” said one 

and the other did not respond

and then I saw Marcel’s 

cover picture of a tawny Renaissance 

canvas (Italian most probably, 

I thought) with lutenists adoring 

at the Nativity—fascinated but 

humbled with my scant art history 

I Googled it and found it was 

by Piero della Francesca:

oh I am running out of words 

to describe blue I could hear Elvis’

mumbling tremolo I’ll have a blue blue

Christmas without you 

and Mel Torme’s chestnuts roasting

on an open fire (which are shades

of the manger’s brown)

our chestnuts of course can be found 

only in supermarkets I remember 

the only short story I wrote in college

was perhaps tinged with Christmas blue 

and called predictably The Gift 

while trying hard to be in the style 

of O. Henry and like many of us 

I didn’t know Ang Pasko ay Sumapit 

(meant to dispel the blues) 

was first written in Cebuano

 

 

Marne Kilates 

December 20, 2015

I was captivated by the darkest blue

Florentine gown of the Virgin

so blue as if there were stars in it

coruscating in the fathomless 

blue of the drapery behind her 

like the Solsequiem blue

Marj Evasco used to describe 

a Picasso so deep and pure but never 

opaque to accent the infant flesh 

the incarnation of the Spirit 

swaddled in an even deeper cerulean

the fabric crinkling like silk 

or organdy with cirrus wisps 

surely cushioning him on the gritty

brown ground not the baby blue

of flannel but veined vortices of lapis

the shadows infinite velvet indigo 

as deep as the universe deeper 

than the slate frock of one of the lutenists 

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