The Awful Rowing (Toward God)

'Perhaps God is only a deep voice
 heard by the deaf,
 I do not know'
               -Anne Sexton


Where is God, what sun, what moon
towed the misogyny
to leave me here in his blood?
The far off island of blinking starlight
winks and carries me off:
I am floating, I am rowing.

Seeking, I am always seeking;
such tedious labor to play this game.
He is receding as I push on to his
island in the sun
inhaling its fishy, sour sobriety.

My skin is removed of its endurance,
I am raw, blistered in the salt air,
glued to this loathsome work
full of repetition and of wondering how,
why am I not further along than
this distance would allow and
so willingly could provide?

I let go and drift further away,
yet not toward a reckoning vision,
a dock of any real knowing.
Who knows God at all, really?
He bobs to and fro on the horizon
of seasickness, yet
to strive to know is to row and row,
I surmise, on and on,
my heart's futile desires in tow.

Where is the frothy outcome
of this great race and whom is winning,
am not I, I ask God, to no reply?
His smile is a passing cloud I long to be,
or anything but myself who hunts death,
stalks it even, pushing against all odds to it
for the currents would have me onto
the shores of insanity otherwise.
I wish to die perfectly, gulped by the ocean,

Enfolded into the swift waters like a water baby,
fins shimmering in the sun, as unflawed as its life.
I am streamlined for this struggle of returning
though I remember not my origins,
my moments of growth,
what brought me here.
What abandoned my great struggle
for living and life,
I do not know.

That great void that calls to me
and teases my perceptions has no voice;
it is a voiceless agony,
an awful calling to arms.
My arms are at my side as my resistance falls
and it keeps a poker face, so do I for the sake of it.
I cannot know why it swims around me
like an awful, hungry fish waiting for
the inevitable decay of my hope;
nothing dies whole in these waters.

I remember growing, learning, reaching
from a square crib to a square desk to
a square sheet of paper,
filling it up with the unknowns,
the uncertain words of tentativity
that were so brassy, yet so unaware
of what was to come:
The great fall of the stone heart
plunked into an unremembering ocean
undocumented in its descent,
lost to the island of God
and its salvation.

I see him in the distance, that hooligan
and I row on.
I inhale deeply from a cigarette,
satiated
and unashamed to die.

             .....

(an epic non-entry)