Wrestling with Religion

    The years have taught us, on the rim of the unrailed pit of unknowing, to stare down at purest blank knowing the ledge we stand on is more, as we ourselves are, of that pit, floored with ignorance only, faith and consternation.                                Middle age returns us with a richer despair to that pubescent catastrophe (quaintly nineteenth-century) when our coats of knowing raveled us naked to winds of namelessness-- still without name.

    As if my latest refusal To make sense called the bluff Of an intransigent demiurge, His dada clockwork. Well, My pout is hardly the first And not likely to make Mr. Big Punch skylights in his Platonic cave. Everything’s infinitely more likely To have been some other thing— Like you, who only last week  Were here alive, and here I am Sitting across a blue table From you, and you are again.