Shape and Substance

Maybe it's the sour mood I'm this inauguration day. Maybe it's the nagging presence of the black dog. Maybe it's the cold and cabin fever. But here's a poem I've been pecking at for a while.


A Poor Place for Gods

‘Soon,’ said the crackling voice of the flame, coming from behind him, ‘they will fall. Soon they will fall and the star people will meet the earth people. There will be heroes among them, and men who will slay monsters and bring knowledge, but none of them will be gods. This is a poor place for gods.’
Neil Gaiman,  American Gods, 2001.

This is a poor place for gods.
You wouldn’t know it from the way we pray 
and swear 
and warble praise choruses ad nauseam 
to Something we have never seen or heard 
or known
save in the chancels of our imaginations.
Take a peek at the treasures we lay up 
for ourselves:
small deities pressed in the family Bible
alongside the azalea plucked from the 13th hole
at Augusta National,
demigods riding dolphins in the surf 
as we watch from our beachfront condos,
centaurs chatting 
over stale-brewed coffee, long gone cold,
at last week’s Life Group Meeting.

This is a poor place for gods. 
Americans don’t believe in gods 
(unless they come down to us on golden escalators).
We believe in
in fanciful yesterdays and fantastical tomorrows 
(though not in workaday todays).
In border security and security systems. 
In LifeLibertyandthePursuitofHappiness
(though not if Happiness runs too fast). 
In video porn. The NFL. And QAnon. 
In Somebody Else’s Fault.

This is a poor place for gods.
Gods demand sacrifice and obedience,
two skills 
we never managed to acquire
except on battlefields and in delivery rooms,
and then 
only in service of the proximate.
Never the Ultimate. We dare not contemplate 
the Ultimate.
That would mean there is a limit
to what we can manufacture, take by conquest, 
or simply buy 
even if the dollar is losing ground to the yen. 
Americans are our own Divinities.

This is a poor place for Gods.
Still there is, famously, a bustle in the hedgerow
a stirring wind, 
a shaft of sunlight, a never-ebbing tide,
the faintest rumble from just over the hill.
One would think 
that Something is afoot here. Still,
there must be (mustn’t there?) a meteorological explanation
for the meteor
slashing the night sky like a saber 
crashing headlong into the whimpering world
and exploding,
eviscerating our exceptionalism
and making way for another Way of Life.

We worry about sea level rise. But really,
weren’t we promised fire not flood next time? 

[I hesitate to cite Gaiman, given the recent allegations of sexual assaults against multiple women (see Lila Shapiro, “There Is No Safe Word,” in New York Magazine, January 2025). That said, Gaiman’s alleged reprehensible behavior seems to me to illumine the ironic truth lurking in his phrase: “none of them”—and none of us—“will be gods.”]