The Naïve Modern God

“O He gives to us His joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.”

William Blake --
“Songs of Innocence
On Another's Sorrow”

The Naïve Modern God

Our naïve God recoils from the falcon’s gyre;
it resists the tumble of the sun’s circular trail
when it, crazed and without the last ozone books
of Herodotus, races soldiery to narrate desperate
defense while enigmatic birds revive cipher
of dark matter with stem cells of unpredictable ghosts
gathered from the dust of make shift dynamite.

Yeats' spirit raised to Ben Bulbin in Sligo church
yields within small lead coffin a larger blaze
resisted by idolatry predictably set in outer rings
of sacraments and horrible sins of nature
that pretend to wobble within the truth of hoops
and stairs that meander within varied mountain
crossed while battered layers of sticks and stones
from every past cannot resolve lies with mystery
now resolved to unfold the end of the Brief
of how we fake god without any predictable
script proven by holy recursive forms before
mapmakers and wheelers fake revised history
scheduled to spit down one exit pass another to
win violent crash as the legs of the dead and
fornicate as splendor without jewels or pestilence.

When you leave Euclid’s hall where first thought
slipped into that indeterminate cawl,
and the end of words and phrase lisp
to twine resists perfect human storms
drowned in gray horizon to rascal story
without recursive formulary as corollary.

The problem exists: if I cannot know Zed
before X, if the elements whatever degree
are not predictable excitement, generous sorrow,
and engagement. We are accident.
I cannot sculpt God from sacred river mud
or scrambled logic substituted as opaque clouds
fashioned in reds and greens with sienna soil.

Great Spirit, if true, has flaked to fire lead
frayed without fair voice while wild birds
mislead by feint of prayer and Priests will
not restore memory to God as their “ka kaws”
melts from their beaks interred first before
claws to wing their patience as great mural
of the war of man and beast, signs of the cross
gathered in the sand, left alive in dunes
not measurable as Yeats said of man.

I remember last days more than apocalypse.
Wild feathered birds, their air bridled by
incontinent stare from human witness
cannot ascend the gyre, no Yeats in hand, to kiss
where reason has no answer for human things
while Blake sings innocence, experience waits:
“He doth sit by us and moans.”





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