SENTENCE
So that’s why prayers don’t work: God doesn’t speak English,
doesn’t speak anything. His books are translations
from something not language, since to begin a sentence
is to drive from glare into the dimness of a tunnel,
losing the view of the harbor, the skyline, the heavens
(the universe of all you’ve left unsaid),
and what can God know of ignorance,
who cannot feel a single, solitary thing
as we do: as, for a moment, all there is?
Not that he hasn’t tried. Once, they tell us,
he let a part of himself be lost
in the dark box of a body, nights like eons
buried alive, the air giving out, each hard breath forever,
so that finally he tore what they call his son
back through the little hole between life and death,
the Earth shuddering, his mother abruptly virgin,
but not before he had cried his one real sentence,
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
That terrible sentence we hold to, all of us,
in this little room, alone with our wondering
who in the darkness of ourselves we are talking to.
FIRE WARNINGS
So much on the verge
of flame.
In a hot
wind anything
is tinder: paper, sage
feverish with bees, your auburn
hair, my hand
that glows with a thought.
Sunset
or sleepless dawn,
nothing is sure
but what’s already burned –
water that’s ash, steel
that has flowed and cooled --
though in the core
of a star, they too
would fuse and rage,
and even volcanic
glass and char,
and the cold seas,
and even
what we once were
might burn again—
or in the heart.
THEORY OF EVERYTHING
I pace my little hall, no mystery,
sit by my window listening: birds, of course.
My books, I can hardly read them,
they make so much sense.
Someone skips school. He knows enough.
Someone is fired, there are reasons.
Someone breaks down. There is reason
after reason after reason.
Some patient is cured, and dies of the cure.
Forms are submitted: natural causes.
They rise through the purest offices
like scentless prayers We believe.
Someone’s frustration sweeps his desk --
papers fly out. In due course,
they touch the floor, and already
troops move. From the bleeding front
fevers spread, and opportunists like fevers,
as evolution says they must.
Houses are emptied, farms stripped
and Death, chainsmoking commandant,
lights one child off another. Pardon: old story.
What causes are not natural?
Who can object to partly cloudy?
Who disagrees with the news as usual?
You're right, the world has no need for imagination.
It makes sense, it makes so much sense.
