Advent

What led a saint in a coracle to cross the western sea?No hollow faith but a bell-like heart, never to be broken,Though blood dry dark as coal and scrolls of saints' lives burn to ash.But tell me, teacher or disciple, where Christ Jesus went,Ascending after forty days? I mean, where did he land?Dead planets and red-shifting stars and vacant spaces echoWhat we really think: there never was a miracle,No voyage bridging earth and heaven. Advent heralds absence,A comet cribbed in ice, a nova traced on fissured walls.The saints are in their shoreless tombs and we forget their names.

Whether it's that reason, like winter's sun, is sharp and cold,Or that faith, like spring, strikes the spark inside the cobalt wave,Stokes the sun, and stores the empty calendar with years,I scarcely know. Nor can I direct the credulous stranger,Who drives the well-mapped streets of our town, which way is leastIncredible: our being here and there at home, or not.We have followed no star, with no map, squalling and bickeringIn the desert, as seasons tore away or dimmed with time—Suffering through youth and age, in dreams of both, come to sheaveThe ghostly fields, or weave interpretations of the void.

A funny touch, those simple shepherds being sore afraid.Good news so rarely happens, or gravitates toward bad,While pain and anguish always can appear out of thin air.Anaesthetizing terror, you will never have to fearA miracle: transitory shadow taking substance,Lifeless air become winged, bright hair grazing the moon's halo,The hills ringing, the pulse of music rising to a chord,Minor first, then major, rapt in aetherial overtones,As if the light sang upward as it fell from sky to ground,And angels joined to hear an instrument of clay resound.