Persistent Illusions

1

What next, Lord? Aren’t you bored sick by now

Of seeing the same old spam in the holy inbox?

How many angels can freeze on the edge of a snowplow?

How much moaning and begging can one deity fix?

If winter brings out the worst in us, it’s your own

Numinous fault. I’m reasoning like a human,

But that’s all I am. And what are you but the question

We go on asking into sleet-warped windblown

Midnights? Sentience is out there struggling

Not to feel, while consciousness goes on juggling

The same nightmares against the same mind-boggling

Black-hole-sized ancient ignorance. We pray insomnia

Will yield to melatonin, a pill for blizzards of agita,

But terror is helixed in the heart, a twisted nebula.

2

The old oak at streetside, straining under a conscience

Of slush, is an idea, maybe, fixed in a mind

Too powerful to be merely conscious.

Those footprints etched in its shadow are mine—

Well, mine and the dog’s. We were alive down there

Briefly, and now are not. From my bedroom window

On the second floor, I look out and consider

The traces we left, how briefly they’ll endure,

Wiped out by different dog walkers, and sunlight, and the flow

Of other ideas as clichéd as this one. The tree

Is a mindprint pressed in prima materia eons ago,

Melting as surely as the outline of my boot, slow

And dense, but shattering in the Godhead’s luminosity, maybe,

Frozen like an old dog’s piss in the golden snow of eternity.

3

Winter twilight strikes quick and silent, inclined

Like a water snake to deadliness. Beyond banked snow, the river

Too is silent. It has no agenda, not even gravity’s. The mind

Of the Hudson is mindless, distracted by the slow silver

Walleyes that drift almost dead in the freezing current,

Hovering oblivious above Atlantic sturgeon

That hide themselves away in clouds of silt sent

South from Poughkeepsie daily by the Great Design.

Nothing down there speaks, Lord, and nothing in the sky—

Or does the sturgeon call out to you, all twelve feet

And five hundred pounds of her, hanging just above

The channel bed, thinking thoughtlessly

Of spring and the scattering of translucent roe, the great

Mother incapable, we believe, of belief or mother-love?

4

That idea was yours, Lord. It wandered

In my soul like a fox in a naked willow copse.

I say soul carefully, not mind. The thought meandered

Soulfully. I say fox for how it never stops,

Its rich red flash deathless in willow shadows,

And for the way it echoes copse which echoes

Corpse, which I carefully did not say. Who knows

What knowing knows? I say willow

Because that’s the kind of copse it was, in fact.

I stood on the edge of an undiverging road

Cut through the center of my soul (soul I say,

Though the saying is not mine, that inhuman act)—

I beheld the winter fox at its holy play

With the fresh-killed corpse of a rat, and found it good.