on reading John F. Deane’s Manhandling the Deity

“unholy” in the beginning
________“symphony” at the end
their long joining through a gate and garden path
through gorse and bog cotton

and a world stilled for a second
as if it had stopped breathing

as if in the space between breaths
the brain might float like a planet on nothing

and the eye open to a flensing, pared down
to a pulse and the long less than an instant

a word takes to thread one soul to the next
I believe in that strange incomplete rhyme,

and all gods
______ broken, precious, and young