Heather Green

The Half-God Appears 

You, agnostic,

standing in god-light at the edge of the wood,

sense the pulse, impossible,

say: truth, tiny, partial, contingent.

Have you been looking for your maker

but longing to live?

I met the half-god

his mother was human she had tears in her eyes.

Or, he came from the back world,

he had tears in his eyes.

He suggested "hold on," a way to die.

*

Suggestion: astonishment.

Suggestion: fruitless waiting.

Encoded in the problem of the 20th century,

from which I emerged,

tiny dots formed the figure on horseback:

not form but the marrow of form.

The half-god is graceless,

but an arrow can't kill him.

The half-god points

to your false hope of fulfillment.

He emerged from the back world his eyes full of tears.

*

The horseback figure obscures the daytime

clouds and the pillar of fire.

He is seen by the unseen and overlooked by God.

The half-god reminds you

that you are still waiting,

belly of emptiness and eyes intent on the leaves.

This half god could be fought with flowers

and rejoicing, but who can?

This is what he took down

open-mouthed, lance drawn:

sweet nights spent in the garden out behind the house,

*

the honeysuckle vines, the garden gate, and the house.

Or was it the waiting that took them down?

The pink pill was the promise,

the capsule broke open, the dots formed the figure:

he emerged from the shadow of the wood

in a lullaby

translated variously as: jealousy, the ground

falling away at the feet, anxiety.

Suggestion:  abandon all hope.

Suggestion: "no one said you wouldn't be changed."

And when he comes, his mother weeps.

Heather Green is the author of two chapbooks, No Omen and The Match Array, published by Love Among the Ruins Press and Dancing Girl Press, respectively. Her poems and translations have recently appeared in Barrelhouse and Denver Quarterly.