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