Joshua Corey

God and Mrs. God in watercolor blue skirt desolate. — David Schubert I am not a woman, I am a man. Made in His image. I keep the house, a gray Cape Cod, and broom it well. I wear a skirt to be comfortable. I build the fire. When my husband comes home I don’t pester Him with questions. He knows where to find His slippers and His pipe. Out our kitchen back door I see the prophets freight-hopping the long bad Western in ancient English that no one need read to know. Everyone speaks his part: the women keep their heads down while the men are losing theirs. Children? How often I’ve prayed for a child, which means slipping meaning looks to my husband as we rock together on the porch of an evening, drinking lemonade and playing Scrabble. If He lets me win it’s a sign. I haven’t won yet. But the neighbor children come and go and take the pies cooling on the windowsill without thanks. Sometimes terrible things happen to them — some man spills the blood cradled so carefully in every hand. I accept no blame. The pies were there to leave alone, or not. God says nothing but taps out His pipe, stands, with a hand to ease His aching back. Time for bed. Our bed is a rolling ocean that I tread alone just a head bobbing above the ash-colored waves while the moon waits for me and everything to drown, to know again the peace the moon knows, the silence interrupted by astronauts, little green men, the spectacle a mother can’t help but make of  herself. God comes to bed and I clutch a spar, a barrel, an oar, and ride out the night with it. When He fucks me still He doesn’t speak, for speech is creation but I rock with him, I roll inside what cannot be comprehended, in force. I forget that I’m a man, I forget the wild sea, I let slip my grasp and the colors I have that cover me. Once I dreamed of the morning: we left the house together in identical sober suits, we stood in the street and beheld the sad little town, wreathed in black crepe for its children. As though the morning could show me His face. He coughed. And when I awoke in our ordinary bed, streaked by sun through leaded windows, I held my baby to my breast and watched the roof  beam and whispered to her,It’s all right, we are safe only and always from our dreams.

As the extinguished. As creatures, coming out to play in the twilight of creation human faces intelligent and suffering, turned upward entering the trees. The charismatic megafauna: polar bears, moose, rippling massive flanks to shake loose biting flies. The fox and the vixen. The leopard dazzling in his camouflage, breaking the urgent glass. In the underlayer of  humus and moss and broken clay the cryptogams, the earthworms turning between the wizardly fingers of the forest, managed growth of the second order, the third, steered toward what shoal, a history for the benefit of imaginary extrinsic persons. In the branches snowy owls and ravens, or the rock pigeons we call pigeons, that can’t perch in trees, that swarm cities like the flying rats they are, hungry, iridescent at the neck like the rats themselves shining like a collar at the base of a public sculpture monument to the fundamental flight through corridors of power, mathematics, heat death rippling like an invisible wave down State Street, paralleling Michigan, pushed by the restless concinnations of  the El, cutting longitudes across the lake itself, desert of water meeting the migrations of alien carp and cosmic rays, diving deep for the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald or swimming invisible lines, boundaries policed by radar, from Canada a mass of air launched by minute variations in temperature, push and pull over heat islands, carbon dioxide absorption, ozone exhaustion invisible and intervening like a god: that which manifests through its action on substance, not itself substance: weak forces, atmospheres, unnamed unmet animal species gone extinct, whole genuses, phyla, unknowable kingdoms and principalities, coral reefs burned black like the crouched and burdened angels, muscular sketches of our vacancy as in an etching by Blake, horizontal, the spiritual body dividing like a hyphen the upper from the lower, phatic messenger of  betweenness, inhuman round eyes fixed on nothing, on suffering, folly, sporting events, on Gaza — wings outstretched to bandage the eyes of  Heaven, our eyes as they would bandage the wound of a headless child or conceal the strength of a people from their weakness, the mortals masquerading as their own fates, individuals slashed open by solitude, acts of mourning and revenge, writing themselves into the text of righteousness. The messengers reveal nothing, like the animals marching slowly toward me now, two by two, tongues lolling, eyes lit from within hollow and sparkling as a cave concealed from light for thirty thousand years but concealed no longer. Grace have I none but what can be inferred by arms opening, palms, head tilting back to catch rain in my jaws: what is born, now, what wrests its way out of the eternal feminine, the body my only warrant, against monuments my pledge to the immaculate moment. What is born is not of me, or the we, or of god, or animals. It is a wing. It is bleeding. It masks my eyes until the thunder comes to open the openness over all.