God Hunger

When the immutable accidents of birth--

parentage, hometown, all the rest--

no longer anchor this fiction of the self

and its incessant I me mine,

then words won’t be like nerves in a stump

crackling with messages that end up nowhere,

and I’ll put on the wind like a gown of light linen

and go be a king in a field of weeds.

*

From “The Body Electric,” edited by Stephen Berg, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang (W.W. Norton: 820 pp., $35)