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Who Did the Placing
By Ward Kelley

You can find a jesus between the lines of a poem,
and there was a time you saw this as evidence
of the divine, yet now you can no longer discern
whether a god put jesus there within the words,
or it was you, instead, who did the placing.


You placed yourself, there, in this life,
crafted by all the mistakes and yearning
of all those years when you said you were
wasting your life; looking back,
it was necessary in order to sculpt
this present one.


A statue is what you aspire to be,
a statue is also what you would like
your god to be. Lives and gods . . .
hard to separate one from the other,
for they both die, and both are wishes.