Porphyry Field

Outside
In the night
I walk on this near horizon
Between the cold glories of the star field
And the loam of root and stem, twig and potential leaf

The air is winter
Clean it scours the face
And bathes it with welcome cold:
December light flung through the sable abyss
With the gentle frosted hexameters gleaming, suspended

Until a singular crystal
Beyond prediction, reproduction
Settles on my brow, melts, the water of heaven:
As once, when beauty from everlasting, the begotten One,
Substantially came and robed in the lesser garb of our familiarity:

Adam again, Son of Man,
Son of God, the perfected Adam obedient,
Who, as God become man, brought man to God.

My nature restored, like brown lands in spring, in forest and field;
My cancerous sin removed, like a spotted goat replaced by the Lamb of God.
My destiny of death and absurdity remastered, like an ironic tragedy
Turned, by a well-placed bon mot,
Into a comedy of romance divine.

Come with me,
I am no shepherd of sheep,
And only an aspirant to a fisher of men.
Walk with me in this amber porphyry, the twilight of a winter’s eve
In the sleeping wheat fields of the Laurel Highlands. See the lane barely wide

Enough for a summer hay wagon
And a bicycle for a well-meaning refugee from Pittsburgh
And an occasional rig from Ohler’s Sawmill down the road, a dented pickup
Gearing past, droning down the hill toward the Casselman, hay stalks scattering
In its wake, and the long sun of the dappled fields surrounds my family plot with August glory.

But that was last summer.
The old graves are white with winter dust
And lateness of the rapid night: Look deeply
Into the footsteps, and in the indentation of ice
Is the indigo of a passing year. I am told that this is due
To the ionization of crystals, charged by friction with the air:

It is the electricity of the spheres
Shown blue in cemetery fields
On Christmas Day,
In glory for the revelation
Of the Son of Man.

Comments

[Charles Curtis]

Et venerunt festinantes et invenerunt Mariam et Ioseph et infantem positum in praesepio.

Videntes autem cognoverunt de verbo quod dictum erat illis de puero hoc.

Gloria in altissimis Deo et in terra pax in hominibus bonae voluntatis!

(Luke 1-16&17, 14)

Merry Christmas, Father.

Blessings of the Incarnate Christ upon you & yours, upon us all.