This is what I mean, when I say God (the poetic version)

God is your waking breath, butter on black bread, the seldom thunder. Hubcaps hung on rafters and your mother’s love of fresh black licorice. Pigeons lifting off from the median when the bus passes by, the willow tree on the corner and the swinging street sign. God is Christmas lights on the water and the scattering of wet leaves, the song you loved ten years ago and haven’t heard in a while. The crumbling foundation stones of a building torn down. The dizzy delirium of everything falling apart and coming back together. God is the unimaginable beauty in this breath and the next and the next.

Come away, now, come away from your chrome and glass, come away from the sidewalks, we’ll work out our salvation with trembling hands, we'll gather bittersweet and baby’s breath, we’ll teach the clematis the lines of the trellis.

We’ll listen to the lovers dancing upstairs to the sound of Barry White; I’m learning the steps myself, alone in my living room, shot with sweet longing. God is the steps down the terrace, the “for sale” sign in heavy wind. Sheet lightning I always sleep through now, like water. A rocking chair you gave me three years ago. Porch swings and confessions. Dogs sleeping in front of heaters. Summer concerts at the zoo and you haven’t heard her in years. God is scarecrows and dancing streetlights, the cacophony of stone and roses. Black cactus flowers and broken cigarettes. God is the texture of light – tensile and whispering. 

God is like driving too long in heartbreak.

I was thinking there was something more than violence and power, there was something more than this sense of pain and loss. And I thought, I should imagine god loving me and I should imagine being touched by that kind of love. Being wanted and held and lifted until I forgot my name and skin and touch and yes. And when God came to me that way my heart broke. My body felt flung open, stunned into a kind of ecstasy: every breath a shatter, cracked like glass, like ice, like brickle. Breathless.

This is my prayer: Open me, unfurl my heart, unclench my hands, remember me.