Tuesday Poem: An earlier version was published by The Church And The Artist Anthology in 1987

 

What If Giacometti Were 

God In One Of His Dreams?

Tossing and turning in a Heaven

clotted with plaster dust,

while what He’d been so sure of,

shrinks to almost nothing as He works it,

or crumbles in His hands

as He grabs at His pounding heart.

He keeps what’s left of them

in his shirt pocket:

little specks of dust: fit a 
hundred inside a matchbox.

How they shock Him 

whenever He opens it, and sets 
them out on the firmament.

How the clouds cradling His

slumber roar and shake
as he studies their hunger,

their heads, too heavy to hold up
on delicate bowing spines.

How sad and spent they seem --

like matches past their light,

or saplings with shallow roots,

wan and vulnerable

on ludicrous big feet.

Plant them and the faintest wind

will flatten them, send them

to rot and mire, until the earth gets

fed up enough to spit them out.

He’ll never get them right.

God in a sweat, while down below,

Picasso can do no wrong. Picasso

with his horny incandescence.

What joke is eternal night 

playing on Him now? Thus He 
cries out and wakes Himself.

The Garden at present looks peaceful,

the man busy at his naming, the woman

strolling brightly beneath the trees,

though He sees the whole thing heading for a fall.

Surely, there’s something to be learned here.
Let new modes of being commence! 
Besides, He quite enjoys the suspense.