Letter to My Son From the Other Side of God

                                      from a bus in a blizzard

                                        

You asked me if I believe in God, when

I stopped, and how that happened, a question

I prayed my father would ask years ago

when I shirked that yoke of love and glory,

that guilt and story, all that sin and and faith.

You believe in physics, you say, and the way

you talk my belief sounds so distant, like

some Greek tragedy or dead Latin tongue 

chanting ancient truth from a lost monastery.

The truth is I am a prodigal, an 

amnesiac, a fraud, a minor criminal 

who bets the house that he's one confession 

removed from rebirth or salvation, one miracle

removed from the prayers I offer up even now.

But the truth is that, like you, I am godless.  

I am as empty as the void of the universe

and all that dark matter you think about,

and yet for me there will always be 

a holiness in that time before time, 

when God created order from disorder,

as if we could ever really know that 

kind of disorder.  I believe that she plucked

matter from antimatter and spun the cosmos

like a giant cotton candy machine,

spinning hot threads of pink and gooey-sweet 
substance and that this led to the great 
swirl of galaxies and light and after it all

cooled we had The Great Ocean and The Great Virus 

and aeons later The Great Lightning cleft 

the human brain so that idea and image 

might smudge and separate and lead to 

human order.

I only know I believed and then I 

did not, and when I did not I felt the 

cold.  I trembled, not out of fear for 
my soul, or guilt, or a savage sense 
of repudiation, but more the loss

of story, the loss of theory, a sudden 
solitude, so much inconsequence, 
the indifference, the lack of anything 
within the atom or the quark or the 
spaces between all that microscopic stuff -- 
it turns out there's nothing substantial about 

the cosmos at all, it might as well be 
the idea of matter, the story of matter, 
the belief in matter, in the end it's
still all an act of faith, no?

What I need to tell you, then, is about

that coldness I felt, that loss, I knew then 
that that indifference was God.  I felt alive

for the first time, son, void of feeling, the way

the universe must be like at its very core-- 

elemental and paradoxical, lacking thought 
or purpose. I was sitting at the kitchen table,

writing and listening to Chopin, my hands 

trembling, I was alone, and a dead star 
smoldered inside of me, and between the

sustained notes of Chopin, the etudes and 

the nocturnes, I felt the dark matter. 
I was a nomad, a prodigal seeking redemption
or absolution from the world surrounding me
and the terror within.