Gospel, Chapter One: Angel

Small towns in northern New England tend to feature playgrounds and ball fields, but few large parks. Cemeteries can be one of the best places to jog or walk.

I am twenty-three or twenty four years old, pedaling my bike toward the two adjacent cemeteries where I jog. It’s a clear and chilly autumn night, the pre-dawn hour, when silence seems to gather, deepen, and pause. Stars are everywhere above and the moon is full.

The rare car is a fast, rushed glare of headlights, then back to such a concentrated quiet that the earth seems as alert and expectant as a meditating mind. I hear only the slender grating of my bike chain when I coast, how trees seem to breath the wind and toss back their branches in their sleep; and the odd dry leaf with curled stem, face downward, scuttering crab-like along the darkened pavement. Each sound is steeped in the meaning that comes with paying close attention, and I am steeped in dreamy air streams of autumn’s ancient pungencies: coldly warm, earthy but without form, seeming to implicitly remind me of things I never could have known but may somehow live to tell. I warm to the ride, pumping and gliding under intermittent streetlights past the gray and glassy stares of shuttered windows.

Entering the back gate, I am engulfed by the black cemetery grounds. I pass through the haphazard chatter of scattered leaves flattening beneath my tires, then knock the kickstand down unseeing into a soft leaf-pile that I can only feel has been raked into place there. I’ve parked beneath one of the dozen or so angels standing on pedestals at the ends of rows.

These are angels that I have known a long time, familiar figures from childhood summers. My cousin and I would roll down and play around the steep grassy hillside, while here and there among the rows our grandmother placed the bright, assorted flowers that we’d cradled over in her car.

Tall and white in the distance from which we usually saw them, the angels were imbued in meadowy greens and yellows when we happened to glimpse them through the shifting patterns of shade and swaying leaves in summer’s lazy breezes. Up close, these sentinels were plainly earth angels, with flakes of blonde-green lichen here and there along their robes and in their faces and hair. Fine brown weathered lines covered their surfaces, and they stood on unpretentious pedestals of brown or tan brick.

Now, in the dark, I look up into the angel’s face where I have parked and find myself transfixed. This sight is so loud it startles silence. She is luminously white, ablaze under a reeling backdrop of stars scattered like shimmering speckles among faint clouds and wispy strands of distant galactic mists. Her radiance seems not so much to reflect but to glowingly transform the moon’s borrowed light, making it her own, only frosted over some degrees colder- as the moon takes sunshine and turns it into moon-glow.

She is a beacon shouting directly into my face from out of all-engulfing space. Her plain eyes, pupiless, directed straight at me, give her the attitude of someone wide-awake but sleeping, like she is seeing everything without telling me. Shiveringly I too glow with something I have borrowed, not knowing how, making it warmer, making it mine; then step out across the lawn to start my run.