On the banks of religion, I ponder the propensity of holy silences. Its how flow.
Why search with feet and hands, eyes and ears and nose
for a formless revelation, for a voice, or sound,
that is Never, ever nebulous and blank, that hadn’t considered we men and women
would write its noiseless musings, would sketch and paint, stain glass,
sculpt figures in its glory, erect basilicas, bastions, gardens, temples, mosques,
la Sagrada Família in attempt to encompass its story, how it borne.
I can not grip it. I can not brush it. I can not drink it, bathe in it, gaze upon it,
so why do I wander, casting my net, thinking I might catch
a god in a stream.
What say we, to the idea that the unknown is unknown because of its nature,
the way the grass is grass, the stone is stone, that a heart, beats, until cold.
Like arsonists, we burn the world in our seeking, peeling
the moss from its bed, the trees from their roots, the cells from our own heads
plucked and laid down beneath microscopes; we’ve built better eyes
better hands, better feet, better ears and noses
to track a thing that can not be touched, can not be followed, can not be
heard or smelled or seen.
At the rivers edge, I think of it: Divinity.
How come my fingers are feeling, how come my legs itch to proceed,
how come my eyes scan the gnarling twigs, the instruments, the roads, my
looping letters and dotted i’s;
how come my ears still listen,
my nose still strains to scent a deity in the wind, in my tea kettle, on a lone page.
How will we ever find anything. Can I find anything?
Odysseus prayed to Zeus, and Zeus came, but only as a thunderclap,
as if the King of Gods could not,
could not even muster.
Poet's Corner 