God's Clothes This is where He threw them - His clothes. No hooks, no hangers, no drawers, just there, where He walked. See them, His heavy, briary coats - splayed and humped, there, in lumps. See them, His flannel shirts - all rumpled, all color-crisscrossed, tossed wherever they could find to fall. See them, like shadows - His dark vests, His socks, His scattered tubes of pants. See them, the mounds, the rolling folds. And there, the footsteps of stone on and on, the toes, the high arches, where His bare body met the joyous sun, a robe of purest light - only, only, only. God, naked in the Manzanita - its complexity, its twists, its art, naked in the cactus - arms up in welcome, naked in the granite mountains, every color of blue - blue to magenta. God, crouching, leaping in the coyotes, the foxes, the spiders, bobcats. God in the naked sand, the naked earth. And this, all this, is what they call a desert, an empty place? I don't think so.
Erich von Hungen is a writer from San Francisco, California. His writing has appeared in The Colorado Quarterly, The Write Launch, Versification, Green Ink Press, The Hyacinth Review and others. He has launched four collections of poems. The most recent is Bleeding Through: 72 Poems Of Man In Nature.
Amethyst Review 