[syndicate] The gods.

[Alan Sondheim]

The gods.


You have heard the tales of white birds, wings from dawn to dusk.
They fill the sky with translucence, muffle the shape of clouds.
Their cries gave someone the idea of language and mourning.
The utterance of the first word, 'inconceivable.'

The bittern knows the gods.

Tonight the gods will descend upon the earth.
They will sink into the earth, but only so much into the earth.
Sinking as if the soil were damp or marsh, unable to cope.
Unable to cope with so much deity, nonetheless resistant.
All gods are jagged gods and all gods are desperate.
All gods are the shifters in language of the second person.
Gods create the third person from the second person.
And beyond the third, a fourth, and beyond a fourth, the fifth.
Once the gods are created they are released.
That is one of the definitions of the gods.
The gods descend like rain into meadows and wild fields.
Fields lain fallow or fields of unspoken appearance beneath glacier and
stream.
Planted, their root systems are shallow, winds will trample them.
Storms will weigh them down with the pleasure and fecundity of water.
It is the incoherency of the gods that is their definitions.
What is released is incoherent, what is coherent is framed, what lies
between them is aliased.
The aliasing of the gods is the jagged of the gods and the names of the
gods, who abjure names.
The punishment of naming names, the punishment of names.
Like sea oats like ocotillo like willows like quaking aspen,
slight movements of the gods shimmer the murmurs of the worlds.
Gods are worlds, are incoherent worlds, every definition a definition
of the gods.
They come in winter. They reside.
Tonight the gods descend upon the earth.
They descend into the soft earth, they sink into the soft earth.
They are invisible to us, we are invisible to them.
The slightest impressions as they bend, move silently, the slightest
sounds, their murmuring.
All gods are smoothed, all gods are filled with the quietude of rustlings,
unfathomable beauty, mist at dawn, the vertical.