postcard: Bread Loaf
(fire on their faces, silhouettes, smoke and mud, a figure emerging from the light behind him, unreplicable)
***
"All day I've been looking at the world thinking God made this. You know, trying it on (God made what the clouds are doing right now, my fingernail, your beard hair, this soft bed of starry grass in the cemetery, my mosquito bites). God as poet. And this other voice interrupts, saying, you're not falling back on that again are you?--you gave that up a long time ago."
"Well can I ask you something?"
"Yeah."
"What's giving it up gotten you?"
"Eh. A sense of feeling safe among others, maybe. A sense of autonomy."
"You do get those things, yes. It seems. But is it the best way to take care of yourself? Does it make sense to believe you're entirely existentially alone? I mean you're not crying at mass because you're moved by aesthetics, honey. You want more. You want transcendence. And it's like you're putting the plate in front of yourself then taking it away. The irony, really, is that you're the only one pushing the plate away."
"Yeah. Yeah. I didn't want to be that person, but yeah."
(the sound of the trucks on the highway, the stones in the wall and the hands that placed the stones, my eyes, your kindness, Mark Doty)
"You want God on your terms, right? Your way of making God. Am I right?"
"But how do you get out of making God? It's easy to believe on a sweet sunny August day in Vermont when there is only this to look at. But it's not true."
(the color green, the way you think)
"You can't get out of making God. Not completely. It's hard. That's why they call it relationship. If you want to love and be loved, dependency is mutually creative--as well as other things."
"Other things?"
(fire, fear, fight)
"Well it's not always a good thing. But I come at it this way. I can surely understand desire, as can you. Beautiful women are great for theology because theology is all about desire. You think God's going to leave you to rot in a box? I've known you, what, five days, and you wouldn't do that to me. Think about that crazy obssessive love that parents have for little Egbert who in the beginning is hardly more than a tube with things going in one end and out the other--and Egbert's crude brutal primitive attempts to communicate--and how crazy excited the parents get about Egbert's gassy gurgling, though anything he's smiling about probably has to do with milk. And all through dinner all you hear is Egbert this and Egbert that. Think about it. God made you, put his image in you, made all this and filled it with desire--his image--and you think he doesn't want it back? He wants it badly."
***
