Standing, head covered, no gloves, hands in pockets to cut the cold, facing the dawn. Heart beating, deep breath fuming, sky huge and distant and all around and crisp blue, moon standing alone, you and the moon facing the coming sun.
Time is electric. Sounds are cracks: distant deer steps, limbs of trees, all cracks from frozen crystals breaking, spaced minutes apart; mostly cold silence, punctuated. The animal doesn’t face the dawn, but goes about its morning. You, solamente, wait toward East, human, expecting what will come there as revelation. You, aware of the stillness of time and the passing of time, see the distant crow flight, the songbird in the bush, feel the cold on your eyes and know that something about the coming light is for you, is related to you, is a sign to you. The light is all things, sounds, silences, friendship, long lost lover, your welcome mortality. You will die in that coming light.
But now you live. The burning orange horizon is beyond color: it is thickness, explosion without sound, it is the glowing birth of titans. Turning around, you see the darker, bluer sky, and sunlight touching, torching the distant mountain peaks. You are amazed at what your eyes see, which is more than is physically visible, the light streaming over your head from the hidden sun to the mountain tops. That invisible light is sensed by your eyes as life, power, goodness, strength. You feel the existence of your spirit, and that it is warmed.
And then there is sound! The light is full of sound, trumpets in the East, and pipe organs in the cold, blue West, sound your ears can’t hear, audible through your eyes and face, miraculously. It is silent, harmonious noise, changing chords depending on where you look.
Day is not yet. Now is waiting, recording, stirring with the inner buzzing of the last moment of death before the first moment of life. Grain upon grain of new frost grows a billion-fold on every shocked leaf and blade in the coldest final moments of night. Insects, snakes, nothing without hot blood moves, and nothing with hot blood stands immobile as you turn to see what time has done to the horizon. Then the roaring hits you fully, the flames, the pillars of light trumpeting out, calling, reaching, screaming, radiating a song inaudible to humans but throbbing in your brain nevertheless, killing death, flattening apathy, melting the night. Your eyes are blasted behind your red-curtained lids, your face scorched but fed, the warmth convincing your body, possessing, telling truth, and the entire physical plane testifying, confirming, demanding the fact of love.