Perfectly Still in the Wind

for Rebecca Fredrickson

And the crow is not God, and the wind is not God and nothing is God that would not break us for transgressions we made in ignorance
—Denis Johnson

God calls you, your hair a field of sunflowers 
off Highway 1 through Saskatchewan.  
God calls you forward out of the meadows 
of scotch broom, out of the car with three 
empty bottles of Pale Ale rolling to my feet, 
and away depending upon your braking 
and accelerating.  God calls you out 
of Bear Canyon, out from the first layer 
of Alberta snow, out from the rolling hills 
of the Peace River Valley.  God calls you.  

You see angels everywhere.  You look outside 
the car window as I drive north from Lemon Creek 
and see an angel with her face pressed up
against the window to your own.  When I pull the car over 
at the steep bank of Goat River you see 
an angel filled with loneliness, and imagine she 
slips inside your pale, blue skin.  You imagine 
she burrows her way beneath your ribs.
Ribs, which are fully exposed as if you 
are already a perfectly still white martyr 
standing before God.  You make your body 
a temple of starving contrition, an offering 
of flesh as thin as a Catholic wafer. 
This is how you want to give yourself away.  
You are an offering of transmutation.  
The way a Catholic wafer becomes 
the body and the blood of God the Son.  

God calls you, your eyes like lapis at the bottom 
of mountain creek-beds.  Do you think its God 
who calls you forward with a flashlight 
and an angel filled with loneliness?  Do you think
God calls you into the Sun Kee Orchard 
where you find that young Irish boy sleeping 
in his tent?  Do you think it is God who calls you 
to the bent streets of Managua where you kneel 
at the toe of Sandinos boot?  Where you see 
an angel attach herself to you from the shadow 
of Sandinos submachine gun.  

God calls you, your hair an orchard filled 
with yellow apples.  God calls you forward, 
but you are lost in the pastures of the Kootenays 
picking cherries.  You are filled with an endless 
need to redeem, to starve, to suffer your 
way into love, into the arms of angels and men.  
Men with ocher dreadlocks and thick Irish accents 
and cherry stained hands.  God calls you, 
your eyes like cobalt lake water under the winter snow.

© Heather Simeney MacLeod