Gnostic Gospels
To be real is to be surrounded by mystery. 
			– James Joyce

He asks if it’s remotely possible for me to love, 
me the sports agnostic, to love the subtlety 
of a perfectly executed give-and-go or pick-and-roll 
	and I say yes, of course, in this moment 
of your explaining yes, you shining zealot awe streaming 
from your face and me your disciple yes 
right now I am desperate
	to understand, be sanctified, worship,

like afternoons in the den with my father-in-law,
physicist’s yellow pad & sharpened pencils, 
	unfolding reverse origami into
Maxwell’s equations: in the beginning 
was the unit charge and God said 
	It is Good! 
until two hours later two cryptic pages of hieroglyphs 
have magnified my soul and all, as in everything, all 
that matters is electromagnetism.

Now years later I try to convert you to the gospel 
of basketball and physics but we flounder, failed acolytes 
	of field theory & screen plays,
more like a couple of lesser moons in wobbly orbit
compelled by gravity we can’t quite grok, knowing for certain
only this: velocity, mass, attraction – all metaphor

for God and this poem some guy thinks 
	he can write about the universe 
and you and I trying to hang together in it, 
the flow and flux and everything connected 
like ten players on the court or  ∇ x E = ∂B ÷ ∂E   	
but never two seeds of experience budding
	the same blossom, so really

isn’t it about time for us to trust our own gravity
and levity and delta E the change 
in energy over time, how many years has that been
	for us now?
Here is where we write our own gospel: the less
we understand  the greater 
	the mystery, my love,
		and the more undeniably 
			real.

{  ∇ x E = ∂B ÷ ∂E    is pronounced    “the Maxwell-Faraday equation” }
 

Order & Novelty
	Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, 
		aber böshaft ist Er nicht.	A. Einstein
	Time flies like an arrow. 
		Fruit flies like a banana.  	G. Marx

O most supremely raffinierte Creator 
of the universe, subtle art Thou: elegant 
as e = mc2, sublime as gravitational lensing, 
though some of us confess (it being good 
for the soul) to wondering: is subtle
the aptest translation of Herr Einstein’s bon mot? 
You, Herrgott, you fan the deck, we draw 
the Queen of Hearts and lo! she has become 
the Ace of Spades, O supremely Crafty One,
O Wily, and just when we convince ourselves 
you’ve dealt us a full house of truth we discover 
you’re holding a straight flush
but poker metaphors are impotent before the majesty
of your subtle hole cards, even hole card itself
a metaphor for the metaphor of dice 
Herr Einstein protests you would never roll
with your universe whose middle name
is uncertainty. 
			Nevertheless 
we are in it and it in us and You
are It and we mostly agree 
on the nicht böshaft part, not malicious, unless
enshrouded within deep reality awaits
some malign concealment we have not yet sorted.
	
What is, after all, under the hood? I rap my knuckles
on this desk, solid white oak cellulose, 
spiraling near infinite carbon strings 
6 protons 6 neutrons indeterminate electron clouds
racked up and layered within their quantum strictures
but mostly really just in-between-ness and emptiness – 
looks solid, feels solid, but what says Schrödinger’s cat
and why these bruises on my knuckles?

O pervasive and untouchable yet so tangibly solid 
fragrant roaring gyrating utterly convincing Creation, 
where are You going and can I come along?
Final confession: lately I’ve begun to fear entropy,
in particular my own, waiting like a letter 
from the government one doesn’t want to open,
certified fate of disorderliness decreed 
by your Second Law: Time’s Arrow
is unloosed and bound to hit the bullseye, 
same damn one for each of us whether
Great Basin bristlecone 5,000 years 
or womb to tomb 21 days for fruitfly. 
Is it time to call, time to fold, 
time to peel one last banana?
Even time to make sense of these lines? 
Alas, the hour must come to unspiral 
and unstring my own carbon, reshuffle, reorder, 
each of us bequeathed this ultimate novelty: 
one last chance to join you, O supremely Creative, 
and together make us a new thing.

Bill Griffin is a naturalist and retired family doctor who lives in rural North Carolina. His poetry has appeared in NC Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Southern Poetry Review and elsewhere. His ecopoetry collection, Snake Den Ridge, a Bestiary (March Street Press 2008), is set in the Great Smoky Mountains. Bill features Southern poets, nature photography, and microessays at his blog: http://Griffin.Poetry.com.