Having Encountered a Three-Personed God

     by a three-personed god,

banished into the sacrament

of a new body, a hut on a pond.

     The trinity of my body and yours has done it.

My body, yours, and something else.

Tell me,

     please, how this hut

was built—

Was it built in a frenzy

     of male and female effort?

Effort, that Protestant word.

                                                          âœ¶

You happened to take the shape

     so perfectly of a man

that I couldn’t help but be lost in my distraction.

My distraction took on spiritual proportions.

     I’ll say again, again, the world is going to hell

in the cheapest plastic handbasket

but I’m moving farther and farther

     away from that world. I was, I am moving toward your lips,

I’m moving toward you—

You, who persuade me to forget

     what I rid myself of—

what we—

Though you shut the door on it,

     though I have locked myself in rooms with it.

Look! I’m ensnared again with life.

Mutinied, ferried,

     enthralled, accompanied

by one who will look like you, who will look like me.

                                                          âœ¶

I had been pent up in rooms high in towers

     paying penance, trying to communicate

an impossible narrative to an impossible recipient.

But then I shed my long skirts, my cape, my boots

     laced to the knee, my layers of underthings.

I shed my rings and bracelets, my embroidered stripes and chevrons.

Beadless, unadorned, simple, without shoes, in the absence

     of a believable god, I traded it all

for a shift—

I found the hut we had abandoned.

     I entered

and the building was finished in a night.

I fished in the pond there and made small fires. It was the air

     in the trees that set me with child.

I did my work slowly and found myself remade.

                                                          âœ¶

Now when I return,

     eyes flashing, hair full, face flushed,

it is that I am coming back to the world.

     Not to the world I was fighting, but to you,

full of moon and sun. What is unweak, true.

     The paintings of the Spanish cathedrals are alive

under my skin, the peonies of summer hang heavy when I wake,

the man, earth-made man, strong as the many horses in the field,

     tender as the newly knitted bone, supple in half dream lies quiet

when I, disarmed, go down to sleep.