Merely in living as and when we lived, we
Heard propositions on the air, such as
The young LDS father in the parking lot
Telling his daughter riding on his shoulders,
You can be a pioneer yourself, for Jesus.
Not, technically, metaphysics, but so much
Metaphysical implication behind the analogy.
Body, as a small boy among evangelicals,
Heard similar exhortations sharing borders
With allegory and typology: Onward,
Christian soldiers, marching as to war!
The spirits we released into the air
From our throats, waving our hands,
Exhorting and gesticulating, what if
They came to life after we were gone, were
Not dependent on us as they seemed,
But left behind by our extinction to discuss
Their fates and origins among themselves?
Under the cottonwoods, extinction eyeing
Me like a raven in the shade, taking
My measure, not picking me apart just yet,
Body imagined the variously described
Versions of Jesus, along with other gods,
Sitting cross legged and wondering what
To do now their authors and believers were
All gone. And then, if that could happen,
The many other supernatural beings
Posited by humans as existing with wants
And personalities, the ones whose authors
And believers died out centuries, millennia
Ago, they could have been circulating
Quietly like lost sheep, feral cats or horses,
All those years while other saints and deities
Were invented, added to the atmosphere.
The sky swarms with human imaginings
No longer home in any human brains.
I could be a pioneer myself, for these lost.
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