Beloved (or: The Legend of Noah's Wife)

Instead of  "Is there a God?"                      

the question becomes:  "Will I see God?"

Peter Kreeft:  Love is Stronger than Death

Through the mildest
or wildest of mornings, through the impossible

autumn come swift, in its switch
from nasturtiums to ice, an old longing lives out

its devotion, always a wife.
In a wrinkle too ripe for her skin, in her aging:

a luminous lurker, a bright absentee, night-
fall zeroed in haste, period-fire her desire cinders into --

Ash to salt-ash, her tastebud implies,
and she washes her lips.

Where is he whom I've loved incompletely?

The long deck dips undead, blue-wake

under her ribs; the bowsprit points at risk,
while a pigeon sorts weeds on the mopped boards.

Algae-loose, touch-and-go
is her hope in their land-smell and the smell

of a hand who knolled grass at odd hours, knuckled
after the flood just to cradle

her newborns, squeezed
wisely her heart-valve, worn heart, where it flip

flopped...followed tempest and time-waste,
the red river home,

all is love, all its fishes.
Ah, the inadequate shoremud as platform to pleasure,

the inadequate boulder in blossom.
Inadequate love

for a god slipping westward, clandestine,
all done.

(c)Sofia M. Starnes               2003

from A Commerce of Moments

Pavement Saw Press, Columbus, OH