I
When god visits us he sleeps
without a clock in empty bird nests.
He likes the view. Not too high.
Not too low. He winks a friendly wink
at a nearby possum who sniffs the air
unable to detect the scent
of this not-quite-visible stranger.
A canyon wren lands on the bridge
of god’s nose deciding the new experience
is worth the fear. He’s an old bird
due to flee the earth
not on his own wings. This is a good
place to feel his waning flutter
of breath, hear his last delicate musical
call, his death song, and then he hopes
to become part of god’s body. Feeling
the subdued dread of his illness
he won’t know for sure until it’s over.
II
He’s now within the form of a whip-poor-will
sitting on a faded gravestone in the twilight
while children pass by the cemetery
almost enjoying the purity of their fright.
Since he’s god he can read the gravestone
upside down. Little Mary disappeared
in the influenza epidemic back in 1919.
He ponders that it took a couple of million
years to invent these children but perhaps microbes
must also have freedom from predestination.
He’s so tired of hearing about this ditzy Irishman,
Bishop Ussher, who spread the rumor that creation
only took six thousand years when it required twelve billion.
Man shrunk himself with the biological hysteria
of clocks, the machinery of dread. You spend twelve billion
years inventing ninety billion galaxies and who appreciates
your work except children, birds and dogs, and a few
other genius strokes like otters and porpoises, those humans
who kiss joy as it flies, who see though not with the eye.
III
Years ago he kept an eye on DePrise Brescia,
a creature of beauty. He doesn’t lose track of people
as some need no help, bent to their own particulars.
No dancing or music allowed.
The world in front of their noses has disappeared.
Dickinson wrote, “The Brain is just the weight of God.”
We said goodbye to our farm and a stately heron walked up the steps
and looked in our window. I had suffocated myself
but then south of Zihuatanejo just outside the Pacific’s
crashing and lethal surf in a panga I heard the billions
of cicadas in the wild bougainvillea on the mountainsides,
a new kind of thunder. He gave Thoreau, Modigliani
and Neruda the same birthday to tease with his abilities.