NOTES ON READING FROM THE AUTHOR:

When I finished the first draft of the manuscript to which this poem now belongs, I noticed there was a pretty significant thematic hole. You could see in other poems hints of the speaker's adolescent struggles with belief and religion, but nothing overt. I don't think I got it down quite right in this piece, but I came pretty close to saying what I wanted to say.  

AUTHOR’S SUGGESTED MUSICAL PAIRING:

FATHER, SON, GHOST

Now the heron-blue fog carries
the world away from itself—
little lake, neighborhood of dogwoods and cul-de-sacs
unraveling to a low, slow breath. 

In this light, cigarette light,
ashtray of morning, tell me anything is possible.
Tell me the trees will clap their hands. Tell me this fog
is a voice moving over the surface of the deep,

 the one I never learned how to hear.

*

God of shopping malls. God of disappearing
store signs, of factory clothes
no one will wear. God of bus stops,
God of personal injury lawyers smiling behind blue webs
of graffiti on benches. God of swimming pools— 

was your voice in the chlorinated water
that anointed my father’s head
when the preacher held him in that suburban pool,
tipped him back like a cup? 

I asked my father where it was.
I went there, found a house 

abandoned. Weeds needling the concrete driveway,
windows boarded or broken, and the pool drained long ago, 

just a green bowl murky with a year of rain.

*

Every bookshelf, a bible.
Every morning, a devotion. 

I remember the idea of God
was as sturdy in my life 

as landscape itself,
or as landscape seems to be 

in memory, or a photo album.
And never is, especially 

in Florida. Any of us
liable to be swallowed 

in our sleep. The idea
of God like the house 

that once stood behind
the laundromat, which, 

one day in 1981, began
to disappear, one oak sinking 

and then the rest of the house
gone, gone with three cars, 

a pool. God’s voice
like three cars in the earth. 

*

This is a photograph:

my father and I heading out to sea,

the bow of the boat dividing the water

from the water.

*

The fog rises, slow-winged,
     departs and shows again
the lake with its rushes
     and otters, its carp
periscoping the surface
     of the water, the mallards
in their evergreen arrangements,
     the deep canal where once
I flipped my canoe
     and keeping it from sinking
felt like trying to keep
     the whole lake from slipping under.
Lake of the never-arrived
     voice, the spirit
like so much bread cast out
     and dissolving, dissolving
among the lilies, among
     the ropes and boards
of the spider-strung floating dock.
     Ghost if you were ever here
I never found a way
     to find you, but found
a black snake sleeping
     curled under my canoe,
found old hooks in the mouths
     of bass and pulled them out,
found, despite your absence,
     a way to live,
here where a little wind
     through the cattails is, ultimately,
just that. And lovely still.