The Astronomer

 There’s a line by Shakespeare that I think about often,

“Hell is empty. All the devils are here.”

It’s from the Tempest.

God has been evicted from the corners of my mind,

His rent was long overdue —10 percent paid with no return 

Called upon over over over again,

Only to collect on my pleas but abandon me in my need.

I knew he was gone long before I was 17-years-old in the backseat of a car.

Maybe religion is a pyramid scheme.

Even as he’s abandoned me,

I still dial his number often — perhaps testing his inbox’s capacity. If the number still goes through, or if it’s just a dial tone.

This is something I’d never admit to anyone who’d bother to ask.

Holding up one of the devils with one arm and helping him smoke a cigarette with the other,

Another told me “The only thing stopping you from crossing over into atheism is fear.”

Fear has been bedfellow since my stepfather had moved into our home decades ago,

But I do not tell him that — this is a party after all. 

The cigarette has neared the end so I put it out on the end of my heel to his amusement,

 I say after a moment, “there are things I cannot explain and so I am willing to believe in something more even if that makes me a coward.”

He nods, a quiet acceptance, and in my mind I tell God that this is not any form of a truce or acknowledgment.

As I hold one man up,

The other tells me to throw the cigarette butt over the fence onto the trax,

He doesn’t want his children to see them in the garden.

I oblige.

Even now,

I draw a metaphor to God and his garden; what he’s concealed behind fences. 

My pleas, nowadays, come addressed in many forms.

God,

Heavenly Mother,

The Universe,

Some higher power that may just be beyond my understanding.

I feel that it is true when I say I was never “devoted” to our religion,

It was a question mark once again posed in the backseat of a car that finally met an end in a deconstructed confessional,

I knew then like I knew now that the God that my mother turned to was never one I would choose.

I have repeated again and again,

“If this is God, I do not want to know him.”

But I am a poet,

I find meaning and metaphors in the most mundane things.

I forsake God but still believed in the divinity of the moon and the sea,

Of pennies.

I tentatively hope to be perceived,

Seen.

Loved.

For graduation, I asked the love of that life for a necklace.

The options of dried flowers had different meanings and I know now that it was some unwritten test I rendered,

And I tried to hide my disappointment when he simply chose the one he liked the most. 

I know that I still do this,

Even though it is not entirely fair.

But I can also admit now — that boy did truly love me and I loved him.

But sometimes that just isn’t enough.

You had assumed, “pennies came from him right?”

I had written about the first penny,

All the pennies that had led me to him.

I think about how I used to push my hands deep in his pockets and the way it made him laugh,

But also the way I used to tap my nose with my pointer  finger my sophomore and junior year whenever I referred to myself.

I miss different versions of myself and the endearing habits she’s had that have fallen away.

When I had written,

“There are no lucky pennies.”

He sent an envelope of them from California to Utah,

And I imagined them leaping to every sidewalk in between.

But pennies,

Came before even him.

I remember reading in high school that it costs more to make them than they’re worth,

A fact filed away into my subconscious.

I look for pennies,

Heads or tails — I pocket them.

I am worth more than the cost. 

Even as God has gone AWOL,

I am looking for messages and signs and metaphors and meanings.

Today, a bee stung me on my walk and immediately I googled “spiritual meaning of a bee sting.”

Maybe the reality is that sometimes pain happens unprompted, 

That perhaps there is no heaven or hell, 

And the devils and angels are one and the same — depending on what God you ask.