awe, an accounting

the first named poet in the historical record
    lived in 2300 BCE, a high priestess
        named Enheduanna, daughter of a king.

she wrote at least three personal pleas
    to her patron goddess, Inanna,

forty-four odes devoted to the temples
    of the vast Sumerian pantheon. each god
        with 3,000 years of history already at its feet.

when she signed her name she changed
    what the world thought art could be.

the Sumerians had gods to hold their awe.
    what I have is the fog
        that blocks the bluffs at dawn.

I name it god of longing. god of need.
    god of power: the sea lion’s throaty call.

god of blood: the blistering
    blackberry, its thorned branch.
        god of awe hovers

somewhere outside metaphor.
    a collapsing star, too dark to see.

the eagle looked me in the eye.
    the sea lion barked my name. I heard it.
        how my narcissism travels—its glorious road—

but who needs it, that road? just a long ache
    drifting blindly toward hope.

I almost hit a rabbit the last time I drove.
    its skeleton crushed in some other timeline,
        half-assed sacrifice

to Osiris or Ostara or some spirit lost to us.
    in this timeline it froze as the car slid over.

then hopped away, presumably with a brief
    new lease on life, if my mother’s
        near-death experiences hold any universality.

the closest thing to awe I’ve known
    was the moment when, still hooked

to the machines, she rasped into the phone
    that she survived, and was happy
        to be alive.

I was on an island north in the Puget Sound.
    I stood in golden late-afternoon sun

and watched as a deer leapt lightly over
    a six-foot barbed wire fence, as if
        it were nothing.

let me rephrase.
    last year archaeologists discovered

an eight-mile stretch of cliff in the Colombian jungle—
    sealed off for centuries by snakes,
        dense foliage, guerrilla armies—

covered in paintings
    created around 10,500 BCE.

mastodons, palaeolamas, ice age horses,
    surrounded by tiny men
        with outstretched arms.

what is this if not awe?
    some paintings are located so high on the wall

that the artists built massive structures,
    tied ropes to their chests, and leapt off.
        they risked their lives for art—the ludicrous

reach of human hope. but existence
    is a prison, so say today’s primetime TV sitcoms.

certainly awareness of the self. for a few weeks
    after the attack, as after the aneurism,
        as after the acidosis,

my mother’s joy hovered,
    haunting the room.

when my brother called
    she told him how she had spoken to the family
        ghosts—how they had comforted her,

turned her back toward earth.
    I almost believed, again, that she was cured.

but the joy dissipated into dissatisfaction,
    then longing, that dense grey fog. what defines awe
        isn’t the wonder, after all.

it’s the fear—of the fall and the fade,
    the harsh hand of fate. the rabbit’s body

could lay smeared across the damp
    pavement. the deer, slit open,
        might bleed freely on the lawn.

or the artist mangled in the undergrowth.
    the poet lost to history through drought

or war or heavy rains. or my mother,
    full of hope, flung backward
        into her pain again.