First,
unstuck my eyes
and thought the room sublime
in all its kind, in blues,

the first tincture in small and nimblest eyes
and an alien chill
which must've uttered
from the tongs about my head,

so is said
of a grand, of a gross start
of the spiritual life of a drip; there is a god

in blundering into know-how there is a god
in thinking there is

a hat, and shoes, a belt to bother with,
scissors to cut out a couple of lucky apes before the flood,
a finger-painted Elijah and his black birds; a lunch box
with a broken clasp; notebooks and hardcovers,
mathematical tables, gold stars and check marks,
next lessons, and silly mnemonics,
the difference between adjectives and adverbs,
hermit crabs and mealworms, judges and senators,
authors and sinners; barrels of handy apologues and syllogistic proofs
to apply the ought in every case; the gorilla's face is flat
for having swindled the honest elephant; living
has its every condition, its bitter rites, its just rewards,
and every effect is measurably linked to its cause
by the ton and spoonful:  you'll sicken for not washing your hands,
you'll pass for practicing your manners, you'll fatten for all the grease,
and for your lying,
your fiction, your conceit,
your dressing an imperfect cow for sacrifice, your skin should peel
for the burning, your tongue will bubble for the gnawing,
the angels will roost above with their sickles at the ready
for the produce of your invention, your dust to gnats,
your soot to festering boils:  these
are the transactions of a child's religion, torture for glory; there is a god

in cause and consequence there is a fear
in fleeing there is

detachment, recompensing certain ruin with a feckless soul;
sleeping in cars with the rent paid and vandalizing some roadside cliffs
with yellow and gray chalk, barking at dogs
and instilling silence in other's conversations,
writing poetry that sounds like prose;
and when many nights the church's chancery shuts down,
the Abbot's own personal demonology is read
for the reading; and the holy water tastes like water;
the account of Daniel and the lions plays like a fantastic tale.

And next days, after finding neighbors through next doors' windows,
happening upon the difference between the cold of a gas pump
and the morgue's dead feet, and checking laundries for coins,
there'd be books written by heretics;
and sometimes the crag over I-93 would yawn more like Esu the trickster god
than Daniel, and sometimes it would stand steady as stone, a creature aghast
for being happened upon by imagination; there is a god

in fancy there is a god
in creating

odd notions, impressed epiphanies with an expiration,
outlines of perishable creeds, bronzed friezes of storied vices,
neophilosophies bearing the import of a quarter hour,
whole divine proofs on a monostitch,
grossly indulgent vagaries of such
to kindly steel up a literalist,

a church-door posting of a cult of one,
elegant syncretisms of cramped ideologies,
reactionary religions like voodoo upon the colonists,
hummed prayer,
grandiloquent confessions,
covenants in the abstract,
and the strained, practiced pose of redemption on a windy dusk
before the bunkering of a life's work to the orphanage
and beginning
with Opus 10,
written in pen,
and disposable.  There is a god

in wondering there is a god
in the exacerbation of the given mind
into discourse with itself;
as a god does
when it does with us.
 

  <