I Make Myself Your Bounty

The prophet stumbles to bed and the woman who meets him there softens and opens their shared heart, its hot blood. We wince when our mouths fill with lemon, we kiss away the salt. The moon is an arranged wedding, the sky a church without steeples or altar. When he wakes up at 3 a.m. to pee and write, he is called back to sleep by the memory of a dream of saving bees. Yet when he sleeps he forgets to dream.

I give you the melting icicles, those fast-receding prisms. I give you my anger and fear.

I welcome your judgment. I trust your perspective.

I give you this map to God, which is not a map to God but a map to end the idea of maps to God. In lieu of answers, I give you cheap metaphysics, sunglasses to blur the sudden intense light.

I give you off-brand aspirin, shovels with split heads.

In winter I dream of spring and in spring I dream of a late summer harvest and in late summer I face the interior pilgrim who faces the possibility he is despised by God and Nature yet somehow lives.

I give you this empty Mason jar.

I give you these scraps for the compost.

Bountiless, I make myself your bounty.

Another night the prophet stays up all night with his confusion, sorting the various voices into angels and demons and mother gods and fathers. His heart a bellows, a water wheel, a basket factory straddling a river.

He strangles on psalms the lesser gods call food. Given bread and butter, he reconstructs both oven and cow.

Without you, he dies to even the idea of absence.