And What of God?

God had nothing to do with the sepia portrait
of a long-haired, muslin-wearing stranger
hung on the wall of my grandmother’s bedroom
behind a hall tree of polyester pants and spent undergarments
who looked akin to my father and Uncle Ronnie. God
was not in the torturously stiff pews of the Congo church on Sundays,
not in the names used in vain followed by mouthfuls of soap.
God was not in the space between folded fingers, not
in the cupped prints elbows leave on the edge of a bed,
not in the clutching hour before slumber,

but in the white belly of a trout, in the elusive bobbed-tailed
doe disappearing through dark green, a pale salamander
under the silk of wet moss. God lived in the slippery space
between the pine and its bark, in the music of water
over the spillway. God, neither Green Man or Mother Nature,
but some combination of both—leaves growing where pubic hair
should be. God was me. God, numb and naked
in a thunderous spring stream. There was no book, no word, no voice—
just a dome of sky and the endless reaching.