I am a deeply religious non-believer ...
This is a somewhat new kind of religion.
--Albert Einstein
A mad scrum
of molecules
scrambling
into light long before
someone breathed out
and thought
to ask for reference,
require meaning,
expecting that
such silence constituted the
back-lit estuaries of our lives
and would lead back,
necessarily, to some initial sea.
Leaves in a whirlpool, rain showers
across the fields,
an offering of smoke against the grey
horizon's grid--
we worked up
theories for our fears
maintaining, nonetheless,
that our past affects us somehow
in the future,
that the sky provides a context
and accounts for
me at 9 years old
in a world where everyone
sang along with Perry Como on
the radio
to "Papa Loves Mambo"-- #4 on the
Billboard Chart--
as if things were ordered for everyone to be
happy.
It was New Year's day, and again my father
was
off somewhere.
I went along with my mother and
her friend Margo
to Butterfly Beach where they popped a
bottle of Le Domaine,
champagne pink as the sunset
sky,
and even I
was given a paper cup fizzing with fading
light ...
and facing west
we celebrated nothing as ponderous
as some predetermined
balance in the universe, a scale model
metaphysical schematic
that applied locally to us, but rather
raised our cups
to the last sparkling breath of 1956--
the sea singing,
the seraphic salt choir of air echoing in my
unconscious blood
and purblind heart.
How to see a pattern now--
all the bent corners
and candle ends? Last year
my mother dying
in the dreary hospice 20 miles from her house
and I left her
for an hour or so each day to feed her
lonesome dog,
to take in the mail
when one afternoon a
roadrunner appeared
out of thin air,
out of the rocks and cactus, came up
onto the lawn, cocked his head
and looked at me with the glistening
dark star of his eye.
And I went up to him, bequeathing
bits of chicken
left from what I'd cooked for the dog,
and the roadrunner
soon knew me
by my whistle,
by a litany of little clicks I
made
and the sound of the garage door
ascending, and he
would wait under the oleander
for my daily offering. I'd go
back in and watch
for a minute or two from the kitchen window,
grateful for such radiant company-- the bright
suggestion of a soul--
who then disappeared a day or two before
my mother died,
never to be seen again ...
Younger, I might have proclaimed
signs and wonders--
the wild green parrots
in the palms,
they must be
singing to someone ...?
And all the dazzling mathematics--
strings knotted in the invisible
dimensions of the cosmic wind--
don't they point to order? But what is
there finally
in the starry spectrum to persuade us that the
universe
takes a particular interest,
such inconclusive prayers as
the heart sends up,
so much dust pulled
from the empty pockets of
a faith?
Beneath the coral and eucalyptus trees the view is
largely obscured,
yet I sit here
under the death sentence of the
stars,
each night holding
another breath,
as if the escaping light
could be driven back
into the bones, as if air ...