How poets encounter God

Dawkins would say I am deluded in collaborating with you on a book about God

two in cahoots indentFrench: cahute, hut, cabin in a world unhoused, split between

those who think they know everything

those who think they know there is nothing.

How, in this combative weather, are those who stumble willingly on to navigate between

godlessness and overgodliness, beyond

preaching, blasphemy, debate

into conversation where two so different voices might resolve domination into cadence?

* * *

At the same time I'm wrestling with form

how to write my father's life seven years after his death without the pen's brutal incisions how to shape a narrative whose submarine-combat climax peaked too early how to list his too-many talents without listing steer between hagiography and warts-and-all.

Is that why, since he died, I have been inflicted with warts

every poem stuck in the doldrums

the marriage of form and content needing counselling?

* * *

I walk in a fog at Katoomba pleased with myself for not being disappointed not to see sunrise on cliffs for being able to perceive shifts of water and light how various and clear sounds drip and splash how rich the green-bice and vermillion when vision is quietened by absence of sunlight

noticing how observant I am of black-chinned honeyeaters and limandra I slip on the wet-metal steps to the Three Sisters

wrench my shoulders and the experience into regular stanzas.

* * *

I'm looking over the rails at an idiot on a ledge half-way down Katoomba Falls looking over the drop

decide to rewrite a bad poem backwards open a box you sent me words clipped from newspapers

juxtapose at random surprise yourself.

When I lose weigh in my backwards journey to convey how it feels to exchange postcards with a vision

four dark hands saying what mattered while Helmut and I translated only the words that were unnecessary from the moment when I and the Walpeyankere woman stood in a breezeway in Alice Springs and saw the tall German husband with his cloud of angel hair overshadowed by the six-foot-two African dancer descending the stairs with him to hook us with her smile

I sift words from the box complex    horizons but still beat the lines into regularity.

Yet I tell you I got nothing from juxtaposing Buenos Aires and bread

You snort and suggest that if my sentences all start the same, I should steal openings.

Should I pirate the Thieving Magpie onto a disc for your birthday?

* * *

Next morning, I take a young journalist walking

she's been to a barbecue in Libya, but never walked in the bush she's intrepid in Baghdad and Beirut, but her shoes are white and soft she says, Someone is lost in the mountains

I say, This is a fire-trail if you want to step