A Foreign God

I have always had a weakness

for wounded things.

Give me the ones

with dirt beneath their nails.

The god with his belly split open.

The goddess dragged screaming through the earth.

The old thing limping home from war

with blood dried black between its teeth.

Divinity has never interested me

until it starts to rot.

I understand ruin.

I have spent half my life

making altars from it.

I have knelt before cruel things

because they called themselves love.

Fed them marrow.

Fed them years.

Fed them every soft animal part of me

and wondered why I was always hungry.

There are men buried inside me

like old civilizations.

Some I remember by their hands.

Some by the damage.

Some have become little more

than bones beneath the soil.

I survived them all.

What nobody tells you about survival

is how fucking boring it becomes.

Eventually you stop being amazed

that you lived.

You wake up.

Make coffee.

Pay the electric bill.

Touch the place where the knife went in

and discover it doesn't hurt today.

Then tomorrow it does.

Life goes on being life.

And somewhere inside all that ordinary living,

the stupid heart survives.

Ugly little beast.

I tried starving it.

Buried it beneath marriage

and motherhood

and graves.

Buried it beneath bodies

I no longer remember

and names I wish I could forget.

Packed the earth down hard.

Built a house over it.

Lived there.

Still,

some nights,

I heard scratching beneath the floorboards.

I ignored it.

I had become very good

at ignoring things that wanted out.

Then a voice came

from somewhere beyond the edge of my world.

Words at first.

Books.

Gods.

Women.

War.

The earth.

Why civilizations build temples

over the bodies of their mothers

and call themselves holy afterward.

The usual cheerful things.

I liked the mind behind them.

That should have been harmless.

There are thousands of interesting minds

in the world.

I have met several.

This one stayed.

A sentence would follow me

into the kitchen.

A question would climb into bed beside me.

I would find myself standing beneath hot water

still arguing with something

said hours before.

Then I began carrying things there.

A thought.

A poem.

Something beautiful.

Something terrible.

A strange little piece of myself

I wanted placed beneath that distant gaze.

Here.

Look at this.

Tell me what you see.

And somewhere between

one darkness and another,

something recognized something.

Quietly.

That was the cruelty of it.

I know how to survive catastrophe.

Give me screaming.

Give me blood.

Give me a door slammed hard enough

to shake the pictures from the walls.

I know what to do with those things.

Tenderness is another animal entirely.

It comes close without baring its teeth.

And I do not know

where to put my hands.

So I called it friendship.

Then affection.

Then something complicated.

I gave it every name

that might keep it small.

The heart is an ungrateful thing.

It grew anyway.

Roots pushed through the crack.

Water found them.

One morning I looked down

and discovered an entire country

growing inside the wound.

Forests.

Rivers.

Ruins.

A little house somewhere

with the light left on.

That frightened me more

than any grave ever has.

Because graves ask nothing.

Hope does.

Hope has the audacity

to furnish rooms.

I have seen what people do

with love.

They build cages

and decorate them with promises.

They carve ownership into devotion.

They mistake endurance for virtue

until somebody has spent twenty years

bleeding politely into the carpet.

I have done my bleeding.

I have been good.

Patient.

Understanding.

God, I have understood everyone.

I have understood the wounded child

inside the cruel man.

The fear beneath anger.

The grief beneath silence.

The abandonment beneath possession.

I could explain every hand

that ever hurt me.

I nearly explained myself

into extinction.

So imagine my horror

when the heart I buried

began scratching again.

Imagine finding it filthy

and half-feral,

dragging itself into daylight

with dirt packed beneath its fingernails,

still capable of tenderness.

Still stupid enough to reach.

Still looking across an impossible distance

at an old wounded god

who somehow feels familiar.

There is the obscenity.

After all these years,

I am still capable

of looking at another human being

and wanting to know him.

His silences.

His wounds.

The things that make him laugh

when nobody else is there.

What his face looks like

when he is thinking.

Whether quiet feels different

when we are sitting inside it together.

What happens when distance

finally loses its body.

I want the ordinary things

with an ache that embarrasses me.

A hand.

A room.

Two books left open.

An argument neither of us

is willing to surrender.

A cup forgotten somewhere

until the tea goes cold.

The unbearable intimacy

of being known

on an unremarkable Tuesday.

Perhaps that is what frightens me.

I know how to love gods.

Gods remain safely above us.

I can worship something distant

until my knees split open.

A man is harder.

A man can stand beside you.

A man can see you.

And after a lifetime

of being looked at,

I have discovered

how terrifying it is

to be seen.

There are still days

I want to bury the whole thing again.

Dig down.

Put the heart back.

Cover it carefully.

Tell it we have survived enough

for one lifetime.

But the ugly little beast

has learned my tricks.

It will not stay dead.

It crawls into my throat.

It settles behind my ribs.

It reaches toward a distant shore

as though distance were merely another wound

the body might someday close.

And I,

fool that I am,

have begun wondering

what his hand would feel like in mine.

That is how quietly

a life can betray itself.

Not with thunder.

With tenderness.

With familiarity.

With the terrible realization

that somewhere along the way

you stopped speaking into the darkness

and began speaking

to someone.

I have survived enough

to know every beautiful thing

carries the possibility of grief.

Perhaps especially this.

The earth takes everything eventually.

Kingdoms.

Bodies.

Books.

Names.

Even gods become fragments

beneath somebody else's city.

One day

there will be nothing left of me

but whatever I managed

to press into the people I loved.

And still,

the heart reaches.

Bloody-handed.

Scarred.

Ridiculous.

Alive.

It looks across the years

that should have made me harder.

Across the ocean.

Across two lives

already crowded with history.

Across every sensible reason

to leave sleeping things asleep.

There you are.