Sarah laughs
and then dissembles.
No, I didn’t laugh, she says.
Sir, the night drapes
hot and limp upon the curve
of cricket song. It is that
you hear.
But he replies, oh no,
I’m not mistaken.
Laugh you do at My control
and nature, prone to bushes
kindled by obedience
and the whirlwinds that
spell My name
in the dust.
Sarah argues with the Lord
as she does with everyone:
me or her sister or the newest
Abram in her life whose daily
fare of hot dogs and sitcom reruns
wrinkles her overeducated nose,
but whose love for her is sure and filling,
a good meal, an after-dinner nap.
Her finger drives around her wrist
her silver bangle given by her mother
whom she hated. A beast persistent
at the millstone, this solitary finger
worries the unchangeable. Fifty
is an awkward age for
renovating epics; the cast of thousands
flake in their rounded tins, slivered moments,
transparencies slicing the skin:
the touch of the spindle: Sleep,
beauty. Sleep.
But Sarah laughs:
Can song, like fire, spring
from old bones tindering to each other
in the night? Can it be
there is no hiding,
that God’s power knows no bounds?
Or does she find Him out,
guessing that her Abram’s leap
to Abraham is nothing more
than Ha! a single syllable of surprise?
And does she know
that time is the child of whirlwinds
writing and rewriting the name
of the restless God
in her infertile ground.
And she will
call this utterly impossible blooming
They laughed.
-Kitty Yanson
Memorizing the Laws of Gravity 