Epiphany
​
January 6, 2021
Lexington, Massachusetts
​
He inquired of them where the Christ was to be born.
Matthew 2:4
​
Not until I went to bed did I remember
what day it was.
That afternoon you and I walked
near Punkatassett ("Broad Topped Hill")
just north of where the jail
Thoreau spent a night in
used to stand.
We walked with our masks down,
through woods empty enough of human forms
to seem a pre-pandemic wilderness.
Our breaths, conspiring,
vanished in the cold.
Ponds and marshlands emerged
among the bare trunks of beech and oak.
The remnants of low stone walls
still obeying their builders' first intentions
drew near, then veered off
on tangents bewildering to living eyes.
They told us how the settlers who drove out
the Natick (first namers, burners of woodland)
kept cows from straying into sinkholes
hidden in the shadows. Also, separated
"ours" from "yours."
If there were any predators
waiting out the prematurely fading light,
we guessed they'd emerge at nightfall to resume
their silent, fatal journey
irrespective of walls,
under star-glimmer.
It's easy to lose your way here,
where tall trees, over years,
have replaced charred meadows,
and trails and cart-tracks disobey
the compass rose's rigid dicta,
surrendering to the waywardness of human traffic
like stones in a wall to gravity.
My satellite app showed us, from any adjustable sublunary distance,
our position in the world to the fraction of a minute,
and where,
pinned on the maze of paths enmeshing
frozen pools and pits of hollow ice pierced with dry, broken reeds,
we were to turn. But not of
the renegade bear or spotted bobcat or coyote
wandering by day.
These hills forget their history.
Road signs remember for them:
our return to Lexington
reversed the path the Bedford Minutemen took
to the Old North Bridge.
It was nearly dark by the time we walked in the door.
Checking your phone you said,
"Something's happened."
On the little screen, people clinging to the Capitol façade.
Flags on the Hill. A Confederate flag.
Murmurs of a crowd under cloudy skies.
A bare-chested man wearing horns and a coonskin cap.
That evening we ate in front of the television,
just like when my family used to watch
Bonanza and Davy Crocket—our History Channel.
A woman dead.
Officers wounded.
Tear gas.
The National Guard marching off the screen.
Inside, someone with a video feed walking down a ransacked
hall to the Senate chamber, where deliberations
would resume.
We went to bed well before they ended
where everyone expected when we set out
for Punkatasset.
Lying in the dark, I asked myself,
Is this, at last, the step too far?
"See!"
See what?
My righteousness reached out to grab
lapels of empty air.
That's when I remembered what day it was.
Feast of "what's beyond"—
hidden, past understanding—"made
apparent,"
manifest to the senses
if not to sense.
The day the Magi make it across the living room
to the stable under the tree, the day a traveling star
reveals the promise of salvation,
Messiah of the Chosen People,
to the Unchosen. The day
a jealous king asks where to send his men
and ends up killing innocents.
Holy infant, tender and mild,
so unlike what the pagans led us to expect:
Zeus, an incinerating flash,
Dionysus, who made Agave his puppet to tear
Pentheus, her son, limb from limb
for refusing him worship.
Agave, mother
brought to her senses by Cadmus,
who told her to look at the sky
and then at what she held in her hands.
Brought to her senses, and to sorrow--
like the mother of Jesus, like all mothers,
eventually.
That's the trouble with epiphanies: we keep
praying for a savior and keep getting
kings—Infant Kings, Philosopher Kings, Kings of Kings.
Why do the nations pray
for a god to descend?
Remember Agave.
As for what the Fathers wanted, how could they know?
Any more than Joseph (kneeling with the shepherds,
just another onlooker) could know
how this Son of Man he hoped to make
a builder of beds and roof-beams,
would stray into so different a road,
up to a broad topped hill
and a tree on which the hammerer
would be nailed?
How can anyone know?
It’s just your imagined nation.
Consent of the governed?
No oracle of entrails or bird flight can tell us.
Just a Ouija board
with 159,000,000 fingers resting
on a planchette
shaped
like a tear-drop,
a monocular eye scanning the alphabet
for binocular depths of meaning,
pushed here and there from no beyond
but from everywhere in
the flat here and now. A fiction
made fact by an act of legerdemain
we agree to take
for miracle.
Willingly, and in no other way,
must we suspend our disbelief.
A poet said this. Another, wandering in exile, sang
of a white rose, its petals unfurled in worship
unvarying and incessant around
the Transhuman.
Love drives us toward it.
Its element is fire—the one that rises
and burns
to be among the stars.
But even poets get it wrong sometimes.
Suspending disbelief is like holding your breath:
eventually, you gasp for air.
And Dante planted his rose in a lake of ice,
whose human forms, each visible
"as a straw in glass" beneath
the frozen surface,
were, when living, the only reeds love
knew how to play—
little epiphanies of love,
and envy and greed
and anger.
You won't get the impurities out
unless you throw out the love with them
and freeze it to death.
That night the Mystic Rose seemed as brittle
as a blossom dipped in liquid nitrogen.
I waited for a sign.
The atomic clock cast its numerals on the ceiling.
Listening to the whisper of satellites,
they told me the time for things to happen
was past.
They told me
I should have been asleep.
Your breathing, too.
Closing my eyes, I pictured how,
from a sky where satellites
take the place of stars, this dark earth
might look as if it knew something,
like a diamonded bride arrayed in slender,
glowing strands
that somehow arrive at gatherings of light.
Your breathing, near.