I choose love. It was simple;
light arrived on the river;
branches opened out before me.
It was easy. I followed them. It was faith.
There was an angel, the kind
echoing the birds we hear too close
to earth to see, who are fists of creeks,
hymnals bodies cannot open.

The divine is the apple in the hand;
love is the body of the worm inside.
Love is a bullet in the brain.
And, hope is the body that bleeds,
using up the end of time to end its reach.
It is lightness bearing every weight.

And, here am I, a body and supposedly a soul
on Lake Huron, an emptiness filling with rain,
ferns kneeling at my knees, and fingers making
no distinction between holding and releasing
the decay that still, for no reason at all, sings out
into the ordinary.