For years,
God was as reasonable
As any other immaterial thing.
He was in the mornings and evenings.
He was in the washing and in the sleeping.
He was in the walls and the dirt;
He was in the blood.
But as with all things perfect, infallible,
Symmetrical,
Time will only wear
Away your sureness of them.
This unfaith creeps on us
As a dream does.
We are assured against illusion
if we will not investigate.
(You could run through it
For years, not letting it end.)
But when we see the trees' reflection
Glinting off the frozen lakes in winter,
Or else read the words of a Frost
or a Keats,
We find, He is no longer in any of these things.
Whether we are then numb or stricken,
His absence will be hollow, unavailing:
"In the depths all becomes law."
If it is possible,
We should not be terrified;
Though we are always terrified,
And if not,
Then blissfully mistaken.
We must slake our lust,
At least first,
In the physical and close at hand.
We must burn with the mornings and evenings.
And be borne in the unravelling of
Washing and sleeping.
These dutiful rituals,
ephemeral and eternal,
Are in each who've walked before us,
Who've learned and hurt,
Who've breathed our air.
It is here we find
The solace of our ancestry.
And when these, too, become tiresome,
And we are stretched thin
By the weight of the metaphor of all things,
Wholly in those most simple,
Be sure that even this
Deepest gravity
Invents itself from within us.
So trusting are we that
The breaking of our chest
Is reasoned through;
That we are meant for this pain
Or that joy.
Is the parting of the grass made; is it designed?
Even from the tides,
We demand divinity!
We must strive to divorce
From these assumed perceptions:
Become the science, sterility.
Be as simplest machines,
dividing cells:
No use of colours,
No shades,
No God.
Then,
When we are yearning from
The meanest seed,
Quickening and suffering,
For now we can not be reduced
But unto death,
The greatest truths lie herein.
Now, we can suppose longing
Onto handshakes,
And let each small weight upon us be Sisyphean.
We may let, too, jubilation be in
The sun's rising, and in all
Things of measured confidence.
In each fleeting moment,
We can appreciate that we will live
For an infinity of moments,
And also not even one.
Suddenly,
He is in these things.
We can be sure He is no corporeal being,
Willingly given up by our tabula rasa.
And we will know that His visage is made of our fathers
And we are in Him: nowhere.
But He is in our questing
And too, in our need for Him.
And He bends backward,
Head over heels,
twisting like our own anatomy,
To meet us, to free us.
We have felt Him each second we have yearned,
And each second we are bloodied by this yearning,
By these moments.
He is in our most procellous highs,
and in the damp wake of loneliness.
When we hurt most,
We know, with instinct, to let pain in,
To lay bare and be torn,
And torn again.
Why should this be?
Because He is there, too!
He is in tears but
So is he in love!
And love is in the ***,
Love is in the burdens.
Love is in our greatest triumph
And hiding still in our writhing panic.
In our joys and fears,
Our surrenders and our suffering.
We are made of the stuff.
And if one of us should fall in His name,
They will then be immortal.
Not in the sky, nor beneath the Earth,
But in the hearts of humans;
In the mortal, frail, beating hearts
Of those who still bleed for them,
Still ache for them,
Every morning,
Every evening.
He is love.
And, as ever,
So are we.
