NaPM April 06 2016

[Todd]

The First Time God Speaks to You

It won’t be like the preachers tell you.
As they strut, confident as college boys
with their father into the whorehouse
of their own imaginings.
God is not concerned
with a back ache in South Carolina,
nor does He speak in the voice
of your wife through a radio transmitter.

If light is simply His self-revelation,
and at a word galaxies spun out stars
like an explosion of so many dying fireflies,
and if breath from His anthropomorphic lungs
filled our lungs, so that we would also speak
and be His image in resounding echo,
than when we hear His whisper, the infinite
will settle on our tongue like a brand, unquenchable.

I found it to be like an envelope torn open,
its contents spilled out--a forgotten detail
never learned, like a string
never tied to an invisible finger.

There was only the name of a stranger,
her life broke open like a piece of fruit,
a half-brother, my likely schizophrenia,
and the pressure to write it all down.

The next day I found, she existed, Ex nilhio,
like a conjuror's trick. Her situation a book
I had already read, and the world became
a wobbly top unable to return to its axis
of silence, no matter how I covered my ears.