Paula Closson Buck

Theory of an Impersonal God

I remember Souad almost drowning
this time to Schubert’s Ave Maria.
          An operatic voice drifts above
where I sit on the terrace,

amid the laurel and the prickly pear.
                          Why think of spirit
as air? More likely it is water—
the edgy blues
          in which the body floats or sinks.

          I do not know the swells
are taking her breath, the currents
I’ve only heard about
          not declaring themselves.
                          I wave from shore, refreshed,
roughed up a little by the wind.
Maybe Souad isn’t looking.

The voice of the soprano makes me distant
even from myself.
                          Is that me
who turns from the water and runs
toward the dunes, hot sand caving

over my feet?
          You could die of beauty.
                    Which means that now I nurse an ouzo,
hear the cicadas in the terraced field.
          Metaphor is the luxury
                          of almost, not quite.

          You can die a death so literal
it makes a hole in the sea the shape of you.
                    And God doesn’t bat an eyelash.
God who is nothing
          like the flashing of eels
or the sea’s interminable blue.

PAULA CLOSSON BUCK is the author of a book of poems, The Acquiescent Villa, published by Louisiana State University Press. She has recently completed a novel titled Drinking with Ptolemy.

“Theory of an Impersonal God” appears in our Autumn 2002 issue.

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