God

must be, I dare now to say,
like a cat, with His / Her / Its
impertinence and delays
in ordering our lives, loves
and ways of being whoever
we think we are, or might be.

I’ve learned this from my own
clever pet, Kestane, who is
happily (I suppose) grooming
herself as she lies curled up
in the wicker chair across
from where I sit in my rocker,
having my penultimate drink
of the evening and trying again
to understand what drives us
in our conceptions of divinity.
She’s not, or, perhaps, she is
the power I’d like to know
will be shaping my destiny
in our long dream of eternity.

But while that idea flies some-
where beyond me, she lies there,
still licking, licking, licking,
ignoring me as I finish this
drink and think about having
a final one, while wondering
if God might really be a trans-
substantial being like a cat,
whose incarnate spirit exists
calmly among us the way hers
does, this evening, as if lost
in some secret desire, as silent
and implicit as fur, to lick
our poor, naked asses clean.

Mel Kenne has six collections of poetry, the most recent of which are Take, published in 2012 by Muse-Pie Press, and Galata’dan /The View from Galata, a bilingual collection in English and Turkish published in 2010 by Yapı Kredi Publishers in Istanbul. His second book, South Wind, won the 1984 Austin Book Award, and in 2010 he was one of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award winners. He lives in Eski Foça, on the Aegean coast of Turkey.