July 23, 2006

Summer morning, Sunday,

mild, humid, slight refreshing

breeze, sitting out at dawn beneath

circling bats, watching tiny

primordial spiders shimmy

their invisible cords

inspiration to aspiring Wallendas,

reading the master of

the mystical lyric, his childhood

prayer:

I wake to light that warms

My eye

And feel almighty God

Nearby,

wondering.

Theodicy, the problem of evil,

suffering on such a grand scale

if God is so nearby, why?

The conundrum thought by some

to be blasphemy, to others proof

of the shush of God since Sinai

or shortly thereafter when Rahab

the whore was saved from the falling

walls and fires of Jericho where man,

woman, child and beast were slain

to adhere to the Word of this same God

called upon to shelter us from harm:

O God, make speed to save us;

O Lord, make haste to help us:

suffrages of evening.

Through the panes of the French

doors, radiant warmth of walls

the color of sun rise draped

with the seasons in Chinese, summer

night pictured hotter than sun rise,

a Chinese fishing boat on the Sichuan

River, cormorants perched on the bow,

auspicious as a parliament of rooks,

harbingers of death:

Among the twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

Then I rose to rub

a head not yet bald,

like peering in to a crystal ball,

and I could imagine in a world

without God a black Mustang GT,

cormorants diving for fish with no retrieve

around their necks,

but not rain, nor the mystical eye

of the blackbird.