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“You’ll burn to ash
in Hades’ fires!” they screamed out,
clubs in hand.
He stared them down, then strode
away.
You think I give a damn?
A lone voice called out from the crowd,
Baffled by his stand:
“How could you be an atheist?”
I think, therefore I am.
A sunlit slick of rain lying on the empty street
Adds a kind of brightness to the morning
Pulls the sky down to where we can feel
The rays of heaven light upon the grave and
stoney earth.
Or maybe it is some rising in ourselves
That paints this elevating spell across our path.
But no god is there to arbitrate this illusion.
And so we stumble on
Victims of uncertain inspiration.
A dancing of primeval celebrants
They swarm to this first of all fires
Flying electric about their fluorescent sun
Swatting themselves ecstatically against
its cold heat.
They are the true believers
Uninhibited worshippers of this
luminescent Jesus
Alive beyond life, immortally free
The incarnate visionaries of the
New Millennium
Who blissfully glide the rainbow’s arc
In an endless orgasm of flight.
And then, without a thought,
A hand turns off the light.
It shouldn't happen to a dog.
In fact it wouldn't, since Norma's been bedridden
for eight years, while most dogs
—even healthy ones—don't live that long.
Before her stroke, when I took a geology class,
she asked, "What you studying that for?"
I said, "Well, I might learn
how those rocks
on Cedar Ridge got there."
"I reckon they been there since the flood,"
she replied.
Noah's flood, you understand. Contest that,
or any word of God's, and you were going
straight to hell.
Her husband died twelve years ago, and
she consoled herself
by convincing herself that he Believed at
the last moment.
- The angina didn't get her.
The diabetes didn't get her.
The medication reaction didn't get her.
The stroke would have gotten her,
one arm still worked,
she dragged herself to the buzzer
that alerted her daughter
that fetched the doctors for another miracle.
Eight years without moving! Now the arm
that rescued her
has just strength enough to push the switch
that turns on the transmitted evangelist.
On lucid days she tells me I must repent.
No longer able to reach the syringe-steepled
shooting gallery,
the T.V. feeds her methadone, and she
doesn't see the difference.
That's what I think. But I can walk away,
while she lies dreading to explain to
God her moment of doubt.
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Voices that are stilled
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