On the Presence of Being Everywhere [poem]

On the Presence of Being Everywhere [poem]

Christ the child is a dry rib in God's hand. 

Sinew is drawn tight, tissue and flesh fashioned 

Into solitary boy-shape. Left to roam 

The fields of heaven, he falls 

Down 

God's high hill. 

He stumbles with the thunder, 

Falls with the rain, is borne upon the wind. 

Finding his tribe inside the Levant, he regales them 

With legends of Jonah; 

Comforts the bloodied lamb, 

Frees the gasping, netted fish; yet still he descends 

Through centuries and continents, 

Into engines and turbines, heat-shocked factories, 

Paper mills and data banks. 

He passes through gates, enters circuits; 

Yet still he falls through land and through water, 

Through mighty mountains of water, 

Brushes the sea-bed's ribs 

& Leviathan's dark flanks; descends 

To Earth's blast furnace, crucible 

Of mortar and molten glass; 

Farther still, 

To atoms, to quarks, and all the intervals between. 

His body empties itself into every other emptiness. 

His immense soul fills the infinite vacancy of space. 

Unbelievable, breathless, almost demonic. 

Yet there it was: 

An actual universe, infinite in volume, brimming 

With dark energy 

And at the center of it all, 

Christ the man containing multitudes, himself a multitude 

Of singularities. 

Incredible so much energy was spent on eyeballs, arteries, 

Delicate nerve-endings, 

For an organism 

So prone to train wrecks and tumors; 

That time was lavished on volition and cognition, 

When every product was destined 

To crack, breakdown, expire, decohere, liquefy, atomize, 

In a shallow grave six thousand kilometers 

Above the planet's core, 

Upon a world suspended in a cosmic sphere 

Radiating forty-six billion light years in every direction 

Yet there it was: 

And God, in his infinite wisdom, 

Or jest, 

Called it good.