When God

to men of sod

would speak,

He wears testicles and feet,

stirrup bones

and vocal chords,

pores, sores,

corneas,

and

tear ducts fit

for venting seas.

A somewhat odd thought about rain, leading into a discussion of sex.

What is man, that You are mindful of him, You have made him a little lower than the angels…

David, Psalm 8:4-5

We are the insect life of Paradise - Bruce Cockburn.

Noah get you ark out!

Its been pounding rain for days, and now the stop … but the ground looks to be all liquid glass with clumps. The canopy has shed. Three days ago the world was all flame-ball and color with the red-red maple and the kick ball trees (Sweetgum) and even the brick red oak …. And now, the sky is fallen at our feet and lodged in the gutters.

And now, I want to record it before I forget. We were headed back from the Tall Grass and on the express when the deluge hit … and it hit me, another odd idea.

I was thinking for a moment, what it would be like to see the road, but without the cars. I mean, we would see the effect of the cars but not the cars themselves. Think of paper mashie' over a balloon, then pop the balloon. I popped the cars with my mind until everywhere, zooming down the expressway were big humps of water like glass whales. The rain would hit the invisible car, part hard and firm around the windshield and the top, then whip with frost and mist into tail behind. Zooming glass whales!

And then I think. What would it be like if all of a sudden we could stop all time … so much so, that the water gushed around the popped whale cars would just hang in the air like ice … like a kind of frozen bubble tent … or dear, like the shell of shed cicada. And then I thought of myself walking up and over the ice cicadas … kind of like when I was a kid, and they drained the Mohawk river form the channels, but left some of the ice until the river flowed out from under and left standing skins of ice or little crashed icebergs. Of course, in that world, you could fall through that ice and drop through air until you hit the unfrozen water below … as I once tried … but I 'm moving from the thought.

So I climbed about in my mind on the frozen skins with all the spray kicked out… and then, I thought, what if we could even freeze the rain as if fell, not like sleet but just stuck in space at a given moment.

Little frozen points of water sprayed through space like metal bubbles.

About and near the ground, the space a frozen stiff would be so dense, that you probably couldn't move … but may be if you could get just a few feet off the ground … you could, with great contortions, squeeze in and out of the drops .. Or better yet, even climb to the heavens. And then I thought that the tails of the falling drops, even as they were stuck in time .. would be so sharp, that you should have to wear iron boots and gloves just to grab hold of the frozen points! So, HA! How is this for sport? Climb some quarter mile up with raindrops for hand-holds and then …. At the top, get in some ball and fall down like a Ping-Pong ball between nails … and guess where you will land!

A somewhat related odd thought, fifteen years later.

Today I see peoples walking about as hard dense clouds. We are like nimbus, climbing up and budding like a towering thunderhead. I see us as a kind of cloud pushed out from the center. Everything is building from the middle and pushing out at the skin. And now I wonder, what is it that defines the boundary? I know that bellies can burst and pour, But what is it that holds the face from drooping down to the knee, or the length of the arm in check? I never cease to be amazed, always amazed at the idea of people spun out from a micro-speck. And here in this speck … all the directions for boundary.

Today, I think of people as walking systems. The dancing bones. I think I got the idea some years ago from an old biology text. The center featured these clear plastic overlays, each overlay showing some other system part. They stacked them so that you had the feeling you were going deeper into the body interior with each overlapped flip.

Skeletons we know. I've seen them real, or cast in plastic ----. We know the scary bones. Even so, I like to think of people as walking skeletons. Like those chasing pirates of the Black lagoon.

And now …. I see you talking to me, yakking with your maniac jaw … I see too, skeletons in cars … or the bones spinning underneath the skater, or stretched like a diver in the air then zooming under water … or all the bones in New York city walking down the street.

And then I think of this … that the bones within us are not these known bones of hard, but rather, green stems --like maple innards that you couldn't really break because of the life-ness. Lifeness? I mean … we see bones when they are hard and bleached and dried. But the real bones are bloody and wet and working and joined.

And now … for my next trick … I see peoples as floating brains. These are not just the brains as held in the shell like a walnut, but the brain with traipsing tail. I see the nerves pouring out, and the ganglia, so that in the end the thing striped down looks like some great Indian headdress or a Man of War jellyfish. The tendrils and lines are branched like choral or feathers or something … so I think of all these walking brains with eyes rolling on the surface with seeing.

We are the walking pollywogs with tails bent and draped.

Ha!

And now I think of brains systems and nerves turning over the uneven bars. A gymnasts is on the bar, but all I see is the brain and the spray and the ropes of nerves and frayed nerve spray rolling through he sky and about the bar.

(sung) WE ARE THE WALKING POLLYWOGS … with tails bent and draped.

Today I watched as kids bounded down the halls of school. (janitor job) They were looking at each other's outers -- The eyes and teeth and hair. But I saw teeth yakking from the skull and wondered for all this: How is it, that with all this engineering on the in, we pay so much attention to the out? Take two kids, one considered handsome the other awkward … strip away the shell and then … ha! Who holds the beauty now?

And then I saw them walking and prancing and talking and sharing eyes. These drifting brains all floating like Indians at the powwow with the nerve tails.

And I think .. What is each person but a great black hole in space? Here are our brains like bottom feeders, sucking in and storing the world. Everywhere each brain … with related portals walks, the world pours in and lodges. The world coding into the gray and stuck in code. The world of yesterday, that unthinkable thing … stored as chemistry.

And I think too … though I've said this somewhere before -- of the world around each person -- swelling. For each person, the things close to them are big … but we know the world is not bigger near the person. So I hold in my mind a model of the world swelling as it nears each person.

Dear ... Off the thought.. After the walking brains I strip folks down to their innards.

And now there is the food man. I consider the system of eating and excreta. I see people walking like cobras lifted up from a pile of garbled hose. If I think of just the mouth with teeth and the esophagus and the pouch of stomach and beyond. And I see the belching singing snake. The snake has swallowed an egg and this is the stomach.

Sheesh …Don't we all look fine. We are singing out both ends and breathing part of what we eat back into the air. Dear this sounds gross. Where is my brain tonight?

And now, I think of us as blood.

The blood is so much through us, that if you could melt away all the not-blood we would look like walking red shadows. Or maybe like trees. Consider each person a cloud of red, all thick in the center with pulse and flow, the heart or red speeding out into the arteries and veins to capillary mist and beyond.

Here of course, the blood is held within the form of skin. But let the system break … let the coolant pour from the hose … and see the fear.

What is it about blood that seems to be like looking at something sacred, and undue spilling seems obscene? I don't have this feeling when my car springs a leak in the radiator, but give me spilled blood on the page and film and I might have seen an angel or a demon. Spilled blood looks holy or obscene or too real. I don't know what I mean to say except that blood seems more like the place where spirit and flesh collide ... or, as the Bible says: "The life is in the blood."

Finally, I think of us as air. It ' s harder for me to think of this system, for while I can see the lungs breaking into me like split trees, the air then blends with blood and then into cell. So when I think of us as walking respiration systems, I not only see lungs , but a thin mist in the form of the body and whipped faster in the places that would be blood … but for this exercise we don't see the blood. And I guess, just to see it, we should think of the air in us with color, or the air in us blends with the air about.

And now I am thinking of the continual trade. I take in air. I mix it on the surface of lung like a fish with gill and send some part of what I just took in into me. I am doing it now. I am breathing, interfacing with the wind that has entered me. And the wind in me is growing a tree. The lungs inside me are like little elm trees with skin stretched over the branches. And the alveoli are like leaves giving off water into the wind ... but here, my lungs are evaporating wind into the blood.

And later , this soiled wind. The non-living wind entered me -- a living system -- and for a moment was a part of life without being alive … but essential to my life … and then left. For some brief minute I transform dead air into something of living air … then discard it … only to let someone else draw on the wind that was in me.

This is weird. The whole planet tonight is belching, sawing, squeezing, and otherwise reworking the wind. We are the walking eddies. The unmoved air is suddenly moved in and then stored, and stolen, and made different, and then blown out. And we all drink and move in this same ocean of our corporate life. My wind will be your wind and the wind of the dog will later be in me or with the horses or later yet in some shark as the wind in me goes over sea and crashes with the waves and makes into the water and the water bears some trace of me that should enter into the life of the shark.

Tonight I think of the air in the world. Tugged in all these little bags. The wind in New York City is being pulled by the lungs of 12 million souls. In and out of little brown boys and gypsies and business tycoons. And we blend our breath with diesel and perfume and stench and old urine in the subway and the roses of Central Park .

So what is this air of our common life ? Lifeless, yet so a part of life … and merging with and giving life … and in some way becoming , for a moment , life … only to depart from life back into the silence of stuff.

Today I see the world as walking wind.

Final meditation.

Today I see people as walking globs of fat. I boil all the things that are not fat away until I see walking through the world bundles of fat bouncing through the air. We have these great moons of fat folding from our bellies like backpacks strung forward. And then there are those little hammocks of fat swinging from fat lady arms. And finally the mounds. Those double-barreled oranges … I am thinking of the walking bundles of fat pressed forward at the world, and I am seeing the eyes of men pointed at the fat …and I am wondering what has God done to design us that our eyes or so much aware of the double-bubbled fat launched at us like a Viking catamaran.

Final - Final thought.

Believe me, when you get to be my age – you'll get that monkey off your back – and then, there you are like a brain in a jar . (Charles McGinn, Dad-in-law age 73)

Oops, I have a final, final meditation. I guess it was inevitable. After seeing folks as walking snakes, or wind, or a spray of electric coral -- I am today thinking of folks as walking reproductive systems. Funny, how we always put this one last. I remember it this way in high school. Our Bio text had all the systems, from cardiovascular to digestive pressed into plastic overlays. But the reproductive part never made our androgynous acetate wo-Man. He, or it, had a baseball cup for genitalia. Guess they didn't want to commit the entire thing to gender. On the other hand, there were at the back of the text those drawings we always turned to study with our eyes bent and secret. But no matter how fast we read, our teacher never seemed to get there. But we found them in the back, and wondered what the girls thought when they saw our wares all pictured and out in the open. As it is, their diagram never seemed as revealing.

The male reproductive system looked something like the outline of Manhattan with all the balls and bent thing and tubes. And then there was this woman thing. Not the thing we longed to see (the interface) but this odd bag looking thing with wings. Or something like a moose head with antlers.

Just how this inner-floating bag interfaced with the outer was the subject of much inner musing. We saw the diagrams, but the interface just didn't makes sense ----

So now I think of us today, with our varied systems poking out of or poking into the intersection of leg and belly. I see us as either walking guns -- or walking flowers. (Sounds like the source for a Rock-n-Roll band)

I read somewhere that the male system of sexuality is pretty rudimentary and "primitive." Essentially, a fill and release proposition. There is, of course, a little more than this. Creation of the fuel, temperature sensitive storage, pipelines and stuff, even a special agent for mixing and transporting the fuel, but mostly this. Men are something of a gas pump: Storage tanks, line, nozzle or ... (Oh dear … load, cock, and fire. Bang!)

So that's what we are--guns with eyes, and fire in our brain. Tanks filled and brimming - stretched - Oh, when does the pressure end!

And then, these women. A different system entirely. A different universe. No easy two-point opposite. -- And I read this somewhere from some woman who said it in a much nicer way …if men are two steps, women are seven. (( I'm searching for the article))

The extra steps come with the moon, the cycle of ovulation. I'm not sure if I've got the steps right.

There is the letting go of a planet that was kept in her womb from birth. There is the odyssey -- the journey of the planet down the tube. There is the anchor at the shore in a kelp of blood. There is the dining and the waiting and building of water like a dam. There is the waiting.

Each egg or planet ... like a princess waiting for her suitors. And with it, this new energy and sexed-up rev on the part of the host. Should the princess find her suitor, some wholly other kind of cycle sets in. If not, the princess gives up and goes --and with her, the whole bloody banquet feast, set like a dinner for a possible child. The dam-burst and the whole flotilla of bloody food and wash and planet is swept to sea.

I read somewhere else that each male is a throbbing tumor; each woman, an open wound.

And so, now, I think of each woman as something of a "U" turned upside down. They are like diving bells; we may see the outer, but up and under is a great void. The womb reaching in and up like a lifted balloon. The essence of womanhood wrapped around a hidden cave. A flower blooming inward…

I remember watching, some years ago, the formation of an apple. It started with a blossom -- some weird double-sexed outcrop. Stamen (the male part) surrounded a sticky pistol. Something like a tube attached to a bulb.

Down the neck of the tube were the waiting seeds. Following pollination, the flesh around the seeds began to swell and take on apple mass. In the first days of growth the blossom could still be seen on the outer edge, and what would become the bottom of the apple. In fact, if you look hard at the bottom an apple, you can still find remnants of the petal, or the very five-fold division of the flower.

So now, today, I think of women as flowers, but with the pistol built back and in -- with this most elaborate edifice. Instead of some petals or even apple flesh is this whole other flesh -- a flower that bursts out with the garnish of arms ... and head and hair ... and legs ... and teeth.

(Okay - I can see it with my mind, but maybe not describe it)

Today the women are walking -- each one, walking like a hidden flower -- each one, somewhere in the cycle of an elaborate dance. Some are wounded, or waiting, or building for the next trip. And it isn't just their bodies that go for the ride. If a man's brain is hot-wired to his testes, I think of a woman's reproductive self twined into her whole emotive self. It is in her mood, in her brain, in her eyebrow, in her gait, in her shout, in her coy, in her wink, in her chaotic thinking, in her striving, in her wanting. And when that mood goes bad -- Dear, these women are crazy, I think!

But not just then (at the time of her period). There is in this task of mothering that gets into their entire personality. Her balance is lower, her feet on the earth. She spies the ground and its terrors...her ears are spinning like radar, her countenance fierce with protecting against the enemy. And before her strut her breasts, like an ever-present testimony to feeding the human race.

As a male I am prone to latch onto these external fixtures of womanhood. I spy the curve, and wish for a moment to be a child tucked in the overhang ... to frolic in the lilies. But this -- these breasts and curves, and the washing of blood...and her fierce eyes - like a mother bear waiting to claw or maim if needed -- are welded onto her soul. Her sex is not just the outer, but the whole inner-sculpt.

So ….

Today I see the people walking ...some of them like spring-loaded traps or cocked guns -- horses straining at the bit -- the ever-building pressure -- storage tanks or draw bridges or erector sets. Or these, the walking wombs -- the fruited tubes, the swelling breasts, or the deep-welled flower -- the confusing blend of impulse -- the begging to fill the flower -- the wanting with the eyes for us to be like hummingbirds visiting the flowers -- a desire at once to be filled or to feed the planet, a desire to cast us away, a desire to kill all men, or lunge like a self-protecting blizzard.

Silly song: "Oh blizzards and guns - don't we have fun!"

The pistol of a flower is its only protection against insects. (Unknown kid quote)

(8/0/01)

In this world where we might ask:

Why does God make this  - or that—?

Why the Poison-ivy or the bat …

Why the scorpion, or fly,

Why the Man-of-War, the cat, the bore, or –

Mosquitoes bearing butcher knives

with grand proboscis drills?

Yet, even as we puzzle over these,

there is a riddle

that perplexes

more:

Why would God make ...

You?

The following is pretty rough cut, direct from lip to mike. It started like plain speech, but worked its way into the rhythmic cadence of a singing preacher. (I was feeling black) I’m sure, If you’d seen me doing it-- shouting and singing down the road At 70mph – you would have thought me odd – But then?

In one sense – this isn’t “pure” praise – It’s hard, when you know you are going for a “product” not to insert the stuff you want folks to hear. I borrowed from the bones in my soul. But as far as genuine and gut felt, this is pretty close. – I could work it a bit or whittle it down into poems (You’ve seen a few) – but then I wanted to present the raw materials. In time I’d like to work this into an epic poem celebrating the ongoing and expansive artistry of Jesus.

As is, some parts may read pantheistic. I am not a pantheist - nor do I see God (apart from incarnation) as having blood and bone and brain, nor do I see God as some sum total of awareness - He is far larger, distinct and Other, and not a voyeur living through our tarnished eyes, … however, I am trying to come to grips with what it means to be "In God - In whom we live and have our being.” David spoke of God, as riding chariots of cloud. Would he have us to see Zeus? I doubt it. Any confusion here has to do with the limits of language, and the vigor of my outburst.

--

Here is Your tapestry upon the ground … trillions of roots, arrayed and twined like shafts of broken marble, everywhere the straw or stringy wet wood fiber, roots running like careening rockets or spitting rocks with strings… I see above, grass all lifted up like mown-down trees, or exploding into mobile sculpture . --- Sometimes I think of what it would take to make a tree – or a weed -- if we didn't have cellulose. I try to sculpt some thing from wire or from plastic. It won't be the tree we need, if poured from cement. The thing must be mobile and reaching. Capable of wind. I think of the tensile strength needed to hoist and hold the branches and the waving solar panels. I consider the roots, and the tower, all without the guide wires of a pole. Or I think of the weeds all springy and green. What would it take to duplicate the look?--- Build me a string that splits into a dozen crowns, and waves a floral head without breaking at the weld.

And here below, I think the slugs that slime across the blades, or more -- fierce beaks and swords, all kinds of terrific armor. Instruments of savage breaking jaw. Mouths that look like vise grips, or pliers, or some weird robot arms.

I'm thinking now of Jesus' mind as applied to the tapestry along the ground. This pan-a-blanket of insect. We see His great work as showcased in the mind and body of man, but what lavish variation is poured into this primitive veneer. What kind of play. I think of the wings, the body shapes, the colors. Neon armor. Eyes fracturing the light and sprayed like mist across the ground.

Should He in one day spray the heavens with light – stir the galaxies like coffee -- then one day later, spill the seas with plankton, and then the next, weave the ground with life as numerous as stars! Man looks like an afterthought!

And here is something of a trick. Many of these things that creep, fly, or wave across the ground, are not a thing unto themselves. They seem ready-matched with flower, like weights in an elaborate mobile. Not only did He drape a swim of plants, a bath of bees, whatever…but that whole complex web of interaction and dependency. A web laid out in a moment in its perfection. He thinks at once the tree and the beetle housed beneath its bark. He thinks at once the tree and the flow of bird into its branches. He thinks the taste to please the bird. Did He think of the beetle-eating bird, and make its brain fit for finding pleasure in the taste? Does He think the tree and then the talon fit to clasp? Does He dream one day the light, and then the eye? Or first the eye, and then the light, filling it with power.

Does He dream the sea and then the fin, or first the fin and then the wave? Does He hold the rainbow back, for later use … or stamp it first on side of trout? Does He dream of popcorn, then create the rules for cumulus? Does He think of sugar in the stem? Does He dream the maple tree with syrup -- then smell waffles in His mind? Does He dream the sugar cane, with the pleasure of children in mind? Does He dream the grass and then the cow with chambers? Does He dream the Rex with thoughts of filling children's books and roar, or more, an object for their crayons? Does He see little girls loving horses and then Black Beauty? Does He see those fishes all puffed up and poured out with spines floating from strings? Does He see shells in fish tanks? ---- Do You see insect collections? Do You see pressed flowers lamenting a love lost? Do You see the red-man with the buffalo strewn over his head in a dance around the fire? Or stalking beasts with bow bent back? Do you dream Sierra Club and beautiful calendars and Ansel Adams? Did You make chemical contributions to the chemistry to make silver halide burn black and share that sky so deeply?

Did You think the rubber for our tires ... the sand melted that should be glass ? Did You make the bees specifically to hone the honey dripping onto my tongue ? Did you wish to make the sea a salt, so that You might call upon it once for an illustration? Did You dream the application of oak, or maple, or mahogany? Did You plan in Your mind the cut that they should take before the carpenter – the wild bending grooves, or tone, or dark ...or the grain that You should one day hold within Your hand? Did You plan the marble made from great convolute of pressure? Did You dream the deluge for oil? Were You spinning thorns in Your mind before eternity and time? Did You dream the meat of beef or pig or chicken, catfish and fish, with an idea for clean or unclean, with the idea of meat in my stomach? Did You dream the hair of Rapunzel? Did You dream in advance the skin bouquet -- brown, black, and white in advance? Did You dream the quill pen, hold a single bird in Your mind for the pleasure of John Hancock? Did You think of the hawk or the eagle wing or (goose?) to make the quill? Do You diagram or fashion bones within Your "head"? Do You bend them, turn them like an artist, bend the different joints? Do You work with a blueprint ? Did You, in that former time--before time --hold all these ideas at once, or tune them? Do You tweak Your creation, rub out the pencil line, step back, examine, apply more pressure, chisel here … modify, or even allow the creature to modify and self "create" against the anvil of selection and survival? Did You pack the genes for latter flourish?

Did Your idea for anything occur in time ... before, or on the day, of its creation? Did You work the combinations -- test them like "a computer" before they should occur -- or do You create on whim and let the thing mutate and settle. Were You ever struck with whimsy, or idea, or creative rush…? Is the size of the sun essential -- Did You do the math, and could it have been another ? … Did You make the moon just so, to set against the sun that we might see an eclipse? Did You think the tube of neck that is the goose -- or the gut of cat to sing under bow to Bach? (Oh, gross !) Did You dream the wind to fly a kite, or hold a kite (the bird)? Did You think of broken mountains with updraft? Did You pre-dream vultures? Do You tinker, try the tendon over here, bend the knee cap back, hold the breast, pull it out or sculpt it up, or pour it out in sublime line with fullness? Did You make the curvature of beak -- design or hear the resonance within? ...decide what should be appealing to a bat ?... decide what should drive a dog crazy? Did You dream the oak to flower pale, the orchid to go pink? Did You see with Spring, the varied shades of day?

Did You know this place, or lines on the map, before Eden : Arkansas , Kansas , Oklahoma , Colorado , Russia , Vietnam , and Brazil , as ideas before the deluge? And what of me or they or us, that we should dwell in all these places? Was this moment right now known, before it happened? Do I walk into a day that You have always known? Do You hold a single sun within Your eye, or hold some billions moving through the world in different spots? …. Do You catch every sight with us, or look down from above? Did You plant a single tree, a trillion seeds, or all at once let the earth break forth like hair coming from the skin of a dog -- but quick? Did You weave the sod with rock, and stick, and dirt and worm? Are they stitched and growing with a blink, or did they sprout? Were apples ready to go right then -- or in years; were they created at once -- young, old, and medium? Did anything come aged or was everything brand-spanking new? Were the leaves the leaves of spring, or riper deep; will they know a fall this year? Do You know about the sun, or something of its heat? Does the word burn or freeze have meaning to You? Do You know discomfort -- and what about this pain? Do You build a neuron, but not have a neuron? Or if our eye is a lesser eye, are our nerves like lesser nerves? We know that You are sight, but how do You comprehend our limitation? Does magma run through Your presence like hot blood? Do You hear the music of Tchaikovsky, or see ballerinas hidden in the form of Eve. Did Disney borrow some idea that was in Your soul when he brought down the first snowflake? Do You dream the skull beneath the skin, the tone beneath the shin, make the blade to cast the shin, see muscles wrapped about the bones, dream a myriad of tones, dress our ears for headphones .... dream of coffee on our tongues, see the way that we should breathe with wonder at what has been made under? Do You hear or feel the sting of water in a cut? Do You dream the chill of water on the skin pulled taut with wind and spray? Do You know the touch of my beloved and all others? Do we wade through You like minnows at Your shins? Do You hear with us at once; are You with us, yet distant ... given sin? Do our voices all crowd into Your ears like tumult; are we all white noise? Do You hear my pleas alone and like no other, even as You do for every one who calls Your Name? Have You only seen and felt through Him? Were You with Him in there in Adam ... then cut? Do You weep through our eyes; is Your sorrow yet expressed? Do You laugh through our mouths, give milk through our chests? Do You feel the blood in our veins? Do You yet have blood? Are You now with blood or beyond it? Do You have in You the memory of thorns or whip or piercing pain? Are You in or behind my skin ... or, are You far from me because of sin? How do You both dwell in me but not with me? Has Your redemption made it such that, even now, as I am a man of unclean lips and unclean heart ... are You walking with me, Jesus ... are You there behind my eyes? Has your redemption made it such that even now, as I am a man of unclean lips and unclean heart, are you walking with me Jesus, are you there behind my eyes, is her brain and its twist and its anger apparent and living in you? Do you feel in her heart the hardness of stone, or the deep injury dressed as strength that is not strength but a scared wound of a bleeding heart Be there now with my bride, my beloved, my life melt on her heart and soften it to embrace me. ..... Let me be to You like one You shine on through. I pray for the day when every thought, every feeling, every train within my being ... is identical to Yours ... and I am absorbed in the fullness we were meant to be.

.

For Him - By Him:

(A meditation on the meaning of the World and everything in it)

Or --

as aided by this 16th-century styled subtitle:

A

trepidate on talon,

Each eye-gate with awe, the weight of His glory,

Fertility,

HA!

God’s sorrow takes on tears

through an Icon of flesh,

Would the founder of flounder now fillet a fish?

Or putting on the skin

get bit

by a flea of His design?

Great Balls of Fire

lume overhead, and tread the Nocturne Sea:

Furnaces where atoms burn in scalding angel light

And with a din like seraphim,

Wings beating to the rhythm of

The Celeste bagpipe band.

Have you heard that record Play?

I’ve been fortunate to see it spin:

Grooves cut in Kodachrome.

on vinyl, black as night.

Maybe someday

We will set a stylus to the heavens

And read it like a CD whirling color.

Until Then

I imagine Vivaldi

Sung from the throat of whales:

Humpbacks humping, hound dogs howling, willows wailing, 

tubas trilling, black-holes blasting, atoms reeling ...

Could we ever have imagined

what is real?