After Gizzi’s the Present is Constant Elegy

The only words to use when speaking of God are the words that come out. Without fail, they will mean little. Do not take them literally - they are an attempt to hold onto what cannot be found. 

Those years when I was alive, I lived in the era of hot coffee.

Along the way I discovered the night, its fire, the breath of a cigarette in its wakeful calm - take in the flame and you shall know the shape of darkness.

There were weeds and fresh air in plenty - the canary yellow calling the morning from the mountain. It’s a wonderful thing, staying in our unknowing.

Those years when I was alive, I lived in the era of the warming sea.

What does blue want? To be the color of sand, shape unmapped and each grain going from stone to shore with new uses: transfiguration! 

There I was, outside at noon each day waiting for the sun to tell me its sorrow, but it stared blankly on, echoing in my epidermis, forgetting to wish me well. 

Those years when I was alive, I lived in the era of the ipod.

There we were – music in palm, the shimmer of Sacramento green, slice of hill, stadium lights 

and the pulsing in the corner where the lion’s tooth sang on and on and on.

There were bricks going back to earth, a wing caught up in the decomposition - this the 7th heaven.

And I found myself turning out the drive and into music. 

The poem found me elsewhere, when awake and expectant, full of doubt, open to the many shapes of god.

The moon was always there but useless, and what of the sun – offstage, turned, and weeping. 

Vanity springs so quickly, its wretched tooth and it’s known angles – I'm sick of the cutting, the belief that rising up is the way to god. 

We should dig, dig, and dig. Say it without ambiguity: God is in the ground! In a seed! Waiting again and again to be born! 

Behold the earth, its undoing