"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 do 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 in flight—
When You retreat catfish deaden like dreams, certainly or leave belly up, drifting to shore, foam-churned, and even the long pike, fins outstretching to You their warming source, nose deep in the sensual mud and grow old, too.
A hardy rudder through sun-gleams You are, for both skiffs sliding like tides
(that lay down spars and timbers after another dirty storm!) & mussels that madden a ship's tired sides will kick the lake bock green or grey. — Maison sur la plage!
The rains and blossoms, too, that inhabit You will shatter hearts into a cruel mist; & shove crabgrasses aside to mash lake rhizomes into a fine bee glue.
You dissolve in tears, too every time the eels loop in mire and loons sing choir in the marshy inlets with thistly sides.
In quite another way, You still hang draping like a Vimy moon,
mother-weeping with obsidian frown & star-dishevelled hair--
You are, that is, a kind of drooping mother-eye who weeps over dead teen sons:
and starved of salt, You who march the clouds red with a bloody sun
(don't You?)
&foretold always as a rudderless Ark that runs aground even here, hulls stuffed with lads anemone-eyed, lying head to feet, scallops for brains & sadly disbudded as You are who leave the dead even more dead,
You who watch always cross-armed over the ones without boots, the dried, emptily drummed sons who wallow in salt.
Volta
Or--most likely!-- You'll hang, aeons from now, in scented cathedrals, a canopy of crocuses and thuribles, of hosannahs slung craftily from leafy friezes;
or sit like forsythia garlands on a moon's own doddering brow--
the sateen- or shagreen- folds of wrists & ankles, with ribs dripping red berry instead of pure court gold!
Herons will most likely jab at your sides and we'll all leave You behind, stumbling over the damnable world that serves as gateway to hell: where--predictably!-- You'll dare follow
all the homely discalced girls ferried in gopher boats to Iroquois ridges, and the catfish dream of the dead and post-glacial hills rise algae-like & flake and fall off steeply into nothing Times.
