I hear myself anachronistically exclaim, “Good God!”
and I think about the god I was given as a child
who trotted faithfully at my side on a leash of prayer.

Who protected me from strangers luring children
into cars. Who accompanied me on my first bike ride
(though I crashed into a rosebush all the same).

Who found lost objects and fulfilled some wishes.
I remember burying my face in the fur of his neck
and telling him my problems. He wagged his tail.

I was still a child when I lost him—gone for good,
I’m afraid—not recoverable by flyers tacked
to telephone poles. But that’s not where I’m heading.

I’m still at “Good God”—wondering about the people
who believe not only in the god but in the leash.
Are they so satisfied with how things are?

How their best friend behaves? Never perceiving
a need to say: Cancer—bad god! Famine—bad god!
Collapsing buildings, dreadful storms—bad, bad god!

Don’t tell me what Aquinas, what Augustine
had to say: these are the bland excuses made
when a dog bites a child, savages the neighbor’s cat.

If you wish to convince me of your god, drop
that childish notion of the leash. Speak instead of
a presence that regards with impartial interest

me and the centipede hiding in the cellar,
me and the house finch with the oozy eye,
me and the hawk that struck at it and missed.

Each sends out its throb of prayer-like longing
to a power that does not heel, that does not fetch,
that is immanent, immutable and unmoved.