NOAH’S MUSIC

Prophet Noah fell in love with rain

Its pounding on the ark roof struck his
heartbeats like a tuning fork

Its white watery streaks coming down from a
black sky womb in incessant sheets

The joy of all those aquatic animals and
water birds the silly penguins and
sleek torpedo seals and weasels

God’s Voice-waves audible in lengthy water music
This absolute deed of His inundation visible

The heavens’ rhythms and mirrored constant
bobbing under the boat’s bow in cordial syncopation

Cascades spouting off the sides
out divinely inspired flues and drainpipes
like flared silvery wings

as he headed from one squall to
another down unfolding corridors of rainfall draperies
blacker than velvet toward no

certain light nor surcease of flood except what
he’d been promised and was

being promised with every rain-beat

His heart out there on the mast like
Odysseus’s earlier ears stopped up and manacled past
the shipwrecking sirens’ incessant magnetic song

But Noah’s heart a tympani for
rain mallets hitting deeper sounds

Forty days and forty nights of aquatic fury
each drop a direct hookup to God’s perfect purposes

Each animal eyeball in the dark trained on the
colossal chaos of water and yet
sweetly calm in their pure diurnal concentration

Noah at the helm letting
God be captain

each driven drop that much closer to His
actual Action in the world

The shroud of sky itself an illumined birth canal
Noah’s boat slid out of at last

washed utterly clean in
earth’s new dispensation

remembering God’s Names forever in the
hammering water drops and crashing waves’

compassionate collisions

6/28/2006
(from In The Space of Neither,
being prepared for publication )

Categories: Poems