The Oeuvre

The Oeuvre

(“Your righteousness, God, reaches to the heavens, you who have done great things. Who is like you, God?” Psalm 71:19)

What lies behind the sky, and behind that, what shines
to light the fires of prying men and women, short on bread,
but long on invention?

What hums below atomic structure, and inside that, what twirls
like wind within each bit of matter that momentary men and women,
short on time, wish to rewind to see it all again?

The days are gray only until the clouds pass away
and reveal
the open pastels of the polished sky.

Overhead, underfoot, we can shake, we can look
and never see or always sense the genius intentions
of a world beyond imagination…If only it would behave
one long minute.

You, Oh Lord, are not deus ex machine, arriving with fanfare
before the paint has dried and we are cornered. I would happily
drop a coin and another to quench my thirst with a soda
and buy an invisibility cloak the next time I am about to blush
from shame or guilt or memories of the same.

You, Oh Lord, surround our idiot currencies, double-siding
our front-side only presentations. You pass through the
spaces between atoms and pass over our aspirations that
never quite get off the ground.

You, Oh Lord, are our delight. You are the not the final act,
but the entire body of work, the oeuvre, corpus Christi annotated
on every unaltered space of time. We will recite, not rote
memorization, but the ineffable lyric unbound by our
nearly rhymed effort to join words to worthy expressions
of joy.