Click here for Night Wings, a collection of poems by Philip Lee Williams

Following is a sample from Night Wings:

Spreading the Ashes of God
Philip Lee Williams

This early January snowstorm in the South might as well
Be the ashes of God as ice: limbs stagger drunk into noon
Waving birds upward to their creator. The concrete statue
Of St. Francis that guards my dead garden drops its Rosary
Into dreams of forsythia and leather gloves. So I take my hands
Full of these ashes and spread them among the crystal Lord.

Love is the melting time. God spills from my bare paw,
Evaporates into such a sun that prisms unclench themselves.
God’s ashes make their own colors, sunset, death mask,
Poplar bark, the onset of skating where the marsh has gone stone.
I spread God back to God, and chickadees, thinking I have
Brought food, dive for the residue. All they find is heaven.

I am larger than God, am the token of his resurrection
On this slope. God has frozen into the ashes of reason
And weeps because of his uselessness. Science is crystalline,
Crushed down to weeping. My hands burst into flame
And our neighbors think it’s some kind of laughter,
That such snow is giggling at the thought of rain.

No snow. These are the ashes of God that I broadcast
Among the buried slopes of fescue and moss, and God
Sighs against me, and I fall apart into snow apes and angels.
I evolve as God rises once more, vapor on vapor,
Into the shedding limbs, and I crawl to the pond’s edge
And see, among the faces there, eyes much like my own.