A la Stevens

As if the world needed another book proclaiming God,
To have discovered the hidden virtues of
God, heralding the first things last
And last things first. I have hidden all my life
Under the sage and the reality
Of the sage: the brushwood close at hand,
Its vanishing solidity, the air
That melts into the mellow sun,
And I was afraid of the long shadows that other men cast
Like bait across the world and over the sun…

Or as if God were not always and had not always been
The God of men and the God of the world of men:
“I am that I am”: fishing hooks at Tarsus, the Elysian
Fields spreading soft as water beneath his solid
Feet, the buoyancy of bubbles on the tides that split
Them: pox and the moonlight’s peccata
Of pock-marked prose, the face.

We too have lived in the world: we too have fashioned gods
Of air and light as air, clouds
Inverting and reverting the grammar of words
And the order of things:
But this is not profound. If there is a God he lives
And changes like the passing stream.