What would pass for heaven for me, body
Wondered absentmindedly, thinking
Of Philip Pullman wanting to reclaim heaven
“From the wreck of religion.” All wrecks
Talk truer than the vessels they were before.
Off Antikythera a mechanism surfaced,
Then an outstretched arm, almost begging
To be restored. If religion were wreckage
It would be well worth salvaging, to be sure,
But for now it still floats, a dreadnaught
With battered gunwales, ceaselessly firing.
More than one such dreadnaught, of course,
An Armada circling one another, cannons
Thundering, decks on fire, sails smoking.
Maybe a salvageable heaven lies below
With the eels, the serpents and leviathans,
The beliefs already sunk. Crooked, swaying,
Body stood uncertainly in American desert
Beside a Joshua tree sufficiently similar
In shape to be a fetch, an inverted shadow,
And scanned the dry horizon for the bones
Of the ship of true faith, as if this could be
The Skeleton Coast and not itself the wreck,
From rim to rim, of a once-living inland sea.
If this were all, if all of this were allowed
To be without being taken from me, thought
Body to self, this would be enough, just this
Light and quiet, this could be heaven for me.
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