Our neighborhood's gone dark again,
all its Christmas lights down now.
We unclipped from our eaves, two
weeks ago in the unseasonable, late
December warm, thirty yards
of blue icicles, accordioning them
into fist-sized bundles, securing them
with green plastic ties, the kind
meant for staking up garden
plants in summer, then packing them
neatly in a box marked Outside.
Our P-E-A-C-E sign with its mad
racing combinations and slow fade-
out-fade-in hangs blankly green
once again for another whole year
with the tools in the garage: crowbar,
loppers and pruners, step ladder.

Our neighborhood's gone dark again,
all its Christmas lights down now.
We unclipped from our eaves, two
weeks ago in the unseasonable, late
December warm, thirty yards
of blue icicles, accordioning them
into fist-sized bundles, securing them
with green plastic ties, the kind
meant for staking up garden
plants in summer, then packing them
neatly in a box marked Outside.
Our P-E-A-C-E sign with its mad
racing combinations and slow fade-
out-fade-in hangs blankly green
once again for another whole year
with the tools in the garage: crowbar,
loppers and pruners, step ladder.

And tonight, the season at last grown
wintry, knuckles cracking with cold,
my wife coils up snaking extension
cords and dismantles our white,
skeletal, antlered reindeer, Horatio,
—he of the moving head—last
and best of show, folding him down
and packing his separate parts
into his proper carton for storage
in the basement, along with boxes
of bulbs, strings of lights, tree
ornaments, some with family histories.
And the two small, robin sized,
feathered birds, one red, one white,
that top our tree as shining spikes
and stars and archangels do others'—
the one descending, the other rising.