The Religious Mood

“Where does religious feeling come from? From the fact there is a world.”
—Simone Weil

—Beginning on the day when, upon a furious terrain,
God trialed the first of his switched-on mannequins,
early earth dwellers forced
to build makeshift houses…

stone tools, weapons, cuneiform tablets, and spindles,
to help them mismanage
both existence and death…

—to leave them hapless in the wilderness,
(unmodified yet by evil, love, truth, or falsity)
those made gangrenous by erroneous beliefs…

creatures kept alive, during this darkest age,
by ideas
still poisoning fruit, still yanking Christless ciphers from wombs…

ideas, like oxygen canisters unable still
in hominids, even angels,
to induce a first episodic breath of faith…

until the Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Cro-Magnon man
grew extinct to hurry humans into holiness…

to allow a botched god
to create finally his son, and a planet
religious enough
to abandon him on.

Three Attempts at Interstellar Prayer

—For David Stubbs (1944-2018)

First Try:

Word-winched before the flesh-stretched catapult of my cross,
I wait, teetering upon
the tip of my tongue

until my held-back pelvis is crushed
down into a chair, to relieve the weight of it: the void’s stare,
and my soon-to-be liquidized selves…

pouring now from the first full-length of God’s own cosmic wing,

as my atoms, one by one,
they go off, like cartridges…

and five trillion faith-free races begin now
to creep out from a crevice in Christ’s cry…

before a real Jerusalem appears, and Christ’s lost resurrectional shimmer
it begins to gleam over anything, begging any new biochemical

organism to depart a rock
and undo sin? Yes,

before arriving inside the icebox interior of a glacier on a world
too cold, where the vertebrae and first skin-covering of my Christ
begins now finally to thaw,
thaw and awaken to the lone global pick
of my own voice trying to break through…

Second Try:

Only myself and my prayer now tilting planets,
abrading meteors, etc.

turning my cold blank soul back into a cloud that burns…

and with my faith now beginning to separate “heavens”
from the thick warm blankets
of greenhouse gas on other worlds:

as three-quarters of my body weight intersect,
where the universe,
weightless, floats free…

until my palms, they handclap God back into the choreography
of a billion arms, into a cosmic polyp or deep space slime
(or anything tentacled and wearing gloves of human flesh…)

to encourage, in no-time,
(amid a forest of my rubber mouths mouthing)
new Christs to be voted in,

before the tinkling of a bell
in some far-off galaxy
draws my lost soul homeward…

Third Try:

—A failed transubstantiation, a lump of quartz to replace Christ,
and knowledge finally of what God did before the world

(before the lovelorn characters of the Bible
got lost in a wormhole
and into God’s mind arrived),

as on every planet, for the duration of my prayer,
my mannequin is shouldered clear of those
chanting beneath me…

(my own body aging but not contesting the relativity
of time that places me on an unknown alien terrain)

as the synchronic possibility of sin on multiple worlds subsides;

and, down into the eternal lift shaft of my soul
drop the skeletons of each Christ I failed to reach,

as I, I begin now to evermouth the truths which, by God?,
can never be told…

—Not until theology, back to my mind, it returns,
and the universe, a salvific mistake, is postponed…
to revert the pupil

at the center of my eyeball into a black hole,
into the deep black vault
in which my father falls…for all time?

Yes, or until when death ends, and my soul startles itself
suddenly into singing:
“I am not saved, but thankful”
and other less comforting heresies.

Lost Song of the Trinity

“[R]arely does a soul know what it is saying when it speaks of the Trinity.”
—St. Augustine

If we say that, somehow, you lack all being,
can we say you “exist”? Or are you merely
the result of a mathematical
trick played on Mary’s brain?

For I simply cannot ascertain

what subtracting one part of you meant
for the other two, those who, above you
were left simply to float, unreligious, free…

So, tell me, was this why

no evolutionary theory was deemed necessary
to help holiness stand suddenly upright?

Or why Christ, an amalgam
of wisdom and heresy cast

such a mighty spell on all beings
fated to parachute their flesh and reach hell?
those landing in squadrons
unexpectedly on Satan’s hip:

to leave the spittle of God’s word on all lips?

Yes, for if one day, by scholastic wolves, all three
of you were split up for good. Which one of you
would be the first to abort
all thought of theophany?

And would you (being divided)

then theologically disagree? For you could not
now know one another incompatibly! But three
of you, I’ve counted three!

But only until some new scriptural passage
in a recently discovered phylactery reveals
a missing, fourth member…

For if Aristotle was right

and there was no beginning, and no telos, what new
compass point could you imagine setting for yourself?
Before some cosmological
butterfly collector nets and

then pins you behind glass in a museum in some other galaxy,
there, where a still unforeseen species with bi-valve openings
for mouths they chant:
“Trinity, Trinity, Trinity…”
while limping every third step.

So, tell me, Trinity, what then exactly are you?
A celestial or microscopic no-bug? Yes, maybe,
that no amount of swatting
will remove from thin-air.

Or are you simply the thought of yourself made
manifest? The spit on the tip of the tongue
of the atheist
who still needs to detest you?

Or if I flap my hands now

frantically at my sides, would you rise, an unfathomable
ascension back up into the skies toward no heaven?
No, for you are no helicopter,
and surely lack even this:

the aeronautical expertise

to re-adjust your trajectory mid-air above the still
grounded carcass of the first Homo sapiens to sin.
So would not even
dare then begin a reversed

thrust away from heresy.

For if you are not simply Eden’s or heaven’s overspill,
is it possible that you could still be, potentially,
an extraterrestrial? No,
for not even a theologian could
imagine anything as fantastical!

Let alone, each of you wearing my mask in the afterworld.

Thus, we have no choice then
but to accept your miracle,

both your vatic, yet avalanching lack of actual bone,
and your hop, skip, and jump toward no gravestone. You,
who must now be ready

then to depart it, our world?

Yes, for never again upon some god-lapsed terrain
will all three of you arrive to take over occupancy; no,
upon no new surface in fact

on which any still churchless

species they stand still and submissively wait for you…
so no new start then for theology, until when you,
a No-thing, but gasping,

you flail past time and space…

And with not one now eschatological worry, as you,
you hurry to join up again with your own kin; out there,
where beyond galaxies,
(where gods miscarry gods),

you, the trinity, you will

be free finally to float serenely: a religion-free invertebrate
beyond the telescope….

The Holiest Man

“If we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space,
of time and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun…”
—Simone Weil

—Perched upon the last cold rock
in the universe, we locate him:
a barely discernible cloud of spores,
pores, and soon-to-be dispersed atoms.
Here, where God’s love
finally it breaks down matter,
and then time and space…

until his face,
a totemic mask,
it is lifted by figures wearing burnt and bloodied laticlaves,
to reveal a body
still steaming with light…
a body prayed
to by stragglers
of a deceased religion, those only just arrived from beyond the stars
to witness him:
this half-floating man,
he who, with one raised palm, rendered all religions churchless,
churchless
and without now any extant iconographic archetype except himself…
a rib-righted man
unable to decay…

—Today, upon this peak,
where asleep among supernatural beings
who have no desire now to love, he sits,
wrinkling and unwrinkling…
this man, who judders and scintillates to the touch,
judders and scintillates,
until the last act
of faith dissolves him.