"The concept of 'God' is the way in which we understand this incredible fact--that what cannot be, yet is" (Alfred North Whitehead)
__________________
(For Father Loza)
In one way You feel like a tough goody (gopher-)wood
of an Ark; the molluscs, of course
eerily jeered but the geese are the first to make shore,
smacking the weeds.
Not any old receding lake will do nor a fawning mastless
boat but geese who recoil
from nothing and crack their jaws open—
When You
retreat catfish deaden dreams,certainly
or leave, belly up, drifting to shore, foam-churned,
or long pike,
fins outstretching to You their warming source, who nose
deep in the sensual mud
and grow old.
A hardy rudder through sun-gleams You are,
for skiffs fueling the tides
& mussels maddening a ship's tired sides will kick
the lake bock green or grey,
and lay down shingles and timbers for another dirty
day:
— Maison sur la plage!
The rains and blossoms, too, that tenant You but dissolve
hearts into a cruel mist; & shove
crabgrasses aside, mashing rhizomes into fine bee-glue.
You dissolve in tears, too
as the groves loop in mire and loons turn silent as marshy
inlets with thistly sides.
In quite another way, You still hang draping like Vimy moon,
mother-weeping with obsidian
frown & star-dishevelled hair--
You are, that is, a kind of
drooping mother-eye
who peeps over teen sons:
early scented, and carved in salt, You who march the clouds
red with 'em (don't You?)
sent always as a prowless Ark that runs aground even here,
hulls stuffed with lads anemone-eyed,
feet to feet, scallop- brained & sadly disbudded as You who left
& left the dead standing,
always cross-armed over the ones without boots, the dried, emptily
drummed sons wallowing in salt.
Volta
Or even as (in another Eastertide), aeons from now, You'll
hang in sculpted cathedrals,
canopy of crocuses and thuribles, of hosannahs slung
craftily from leafy greens;
or sit like forsythia garlands on a sun's doddering brow
The sateen- or shagreen- folds of wrists & ankles,sides dripping
red berry instead of court gold!
Herons jab at your sides-remarkable!-most likely and we'll all
leave You behind,
and crane over the damnable world serving as gateway to hell:
where You'll dare follow
discalced boys ferried in gopher boats to Iroquois ridges,
and catfish dream the dead
and post-glacial hills will rise algae-like & flake and shelve off
steeply into recoiling Times.
