Here's one by Janet Gray that I think fits in this thread (a reply to
Wallace Stevens):
ANY REPLACEMENT FOR GOD MUST BE FUNNY
If you were now to start, old Apollonian,
your sermon to the young boys standing guard,
you could not start with the idea of the sun.
You must give up the idea of the idea.
The inconceivable blew up two towns
before you died, before the boys were born.
And we have seen the image of the thing
more elegant and powerful than god
in the privacy of our apartments.
That picture on the box is not our fiction.
It was the face about molecular revolt
seen clearly in its idea by men of reason.
How pure the vast ascension of the bits
of mind and concrete, Pontiac and chicken
that expels us and our images...
And yet how like a criminal visitation
from the fire horses and their bright god
bent on savaging the earth's green women.
This, of course, is nonsense. But that the sun
has tens of thousands of unhatched relatives
is fact, is not idea or abstraction.
And since those towns blew up, the difficulty
of being simply is not enough. There is
a project for the cousins of the sun.
Judith Diamondstone (732) 932-7496 Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183
Eternity is in love with the productions of time - Wm Blake