If you have no gods: make them.
— Katie Ford

As heat builds, I want the red peony soft
with dew,
slow walks past the cottages of Sea Cliff,
even the regimented rows of corn in my
youth,
Queen Anne's lace along country roads,
blue columbine on canyon slopes.

I blame the cold-faced gods who speak
equivocally,
remove themselves from my singular fate
as I pray to the sunflower's gold-rimmed
head
heavy with seeds of itself.

Perhaps the divine is intrinsic.

Early men with their hearths for
charcoal, their rock canvas—

outbursts—sketches of glorious ibex, elk.

*

I am particle, wave,
luminescent as a firefly or disturbed
plankton—
light itself, not perception of it.

Little light entered Nazi camps.
It came from within.
Or the body perished.
Many who survived believed the idea of
God absurd.

I recall a body devoid of light:
my great-aunt posed in her coffin—a
powdered effigy.

*

Yet beyond this plane, aspects of
eternity—

the place my father soared into blue at
the tip of La Gaspésie,
gulls guiding him through the bold
Canadian wind.

the tucked-in body, scents meant to mask
death. Still
the soul, battered, literal thing, flies out
the window.

blue—Virgin Mary, nautical, the deep
tones of slate—
everything touched by its hues—ash
fallen on the world.

his final paintings—a woman whose only
lover is light.
A woman done with the world.

*

What I haven’t said affects me most.
I bring this to the sea as to a blank
canvas—
I cannot offer anything beyond this
grandeur.

My perspective depends on the moment,
the wind’s subtle shift, faults in memory.
As a child I looked through a window
onto the finished field,
feeling older than the great hickory
shading the yard—alone.

Now: the slant of autumn light on
birches,
groans of a moody house,
a chance meeting, the hours.

Marc Frazier

The Finished Field