I’m Listening

I spoke with God today,

Out in the Ocean off of Brigantine New Jersey specifically,

near the south jetty.

God said storm clouds

and sheets of rain,

Whipping West winds and swells high as trees.

God said seagulls hung in the slate-gray sky

like kites over the Ocean

And blasts of arctic spray on my back,

and the Taste

of salt in my mouth.

I said tears and hoots

wordless howls and hollers.

I laughed and coughed up lungfulls of that batismal water

and let those winds rip through my salt-stiff hair.

I gave my body to the water

To God

I let it throw me and bury me

envelope me

Destroy me, if that was what God desired.

Yet God said a wet Marco stumbling out onto the beach,

smiling like a lunatic.

God happened to be eating at the same pinelands barbecue pit as I,

for I saw God in the faces of old wrinkled laughing African-American men and women,

and in the children playing in the sandy parking lot

among the pine cones and dried needles.

I saw God again that night, in the light of the setting sun

reflecting off of the sign for Route 40

and in the fireworks in the summer night

Exploding over the Pine Barrens

and in a flipped over Jeep on the side of the road,

flaming and spitting out smoke.

It’s been some kind of day