God the Whale
Sometimes I imagine the sun striking midday will drop
in a hand’s motion and smite me. Confess your crime:
mine is to love like the craftsman’s apprentice
who never dirties her hands in acting. My dad’s is arguing.
In the debate about the divine watchmaker, he lists
mutating viruses, parasitic worms, the test runs
of extinction and I say if God exists, I think they might
be a whale. Unfathomed and wildering. No cogs
and quick fingers. Just this warm blooded, blubbered God
on a migration path I can’t follow. Perhaps this is because
if God sung a song, I am certain it would cover
vast distances. It would be peaceful
as weeping and if whales could cry, God would.
They say God saw the world and it was good but this is
omniscience tangled in ghost gear, surfacing
through oil slicks, starving for sustenance in a sea
brought to simmer. We barrel into God at 25 knots
and God swallows it – our loneliness and toothbrushes,
bitterness and broken sandals, so when we send up
plankton bloom prayers God has no room
to stomach them, becomes deaf to all but military sonar,
seismic surveys and this: the waterlogged clock,
the leaking battery, the alarm ringing in God’s gut.