An autocratic God solicits servile adoration. But maybe not so simple as all that? Although I can’t get a worshipful handle on this God of which they speak, I’m keenly interested in the language with which the Quran and Hebrew Bible speak that God. Scripture is deep but not always clear or consistent. Because we see it at translated removes? I’m studying to be pious trying to understand what people think it says.
Leave it to a living poet to sacralize hilarity. A joyful chuckle is a blessing. A.R. Zarif invests inspired non sequiturs with more than they ought to be able to contain. How a poem can smite the funny bone and simultaneously smack of revelation is a mystery.
ALL MY LITTLE THINGS ARE VERY SPECIAL IN THE SUNLIGHT. I’VE HAD A LITTLE DRINK.
I just ball the fitted sheet into a wad and
throw it at the closet. It’s fine. It does not matter.
There’s a painting I love by Podkowiński called Frenzy of Exultations
in which a woman clings in adoration to a deranged-looking horse.
The horse’s nostrils are huge
and foam is slipping from its mouth, its tongue curved
so far backward it’s licking its own cheek. The woman appears hopeful.
There’s a story about Guru Nanak going to Mecca. He fell asleep
in the Kaaba’s arcades when an official scolded him
for sleeping with his feet in the direction of God.
“I’m so sorry,” he responded,
“please point me in a direction where there is no God,
and I will sleep with my feet that way.”
(By A.R. Zarif, Poetry, October 2026)
Let me pull out the one line where I think the poem spirals beyond comprehension, like God:
… He fell asleep / in the Kaaba’s arcades when an official scolded him / for sleeping with his feet in the direction of God.
The sentence says several things at once: (1) He fell asleep, then he got scolded. (2) He fell asleep when he got scolded. (3) He fell asleep because he got scolded. (4) He fell asleep after he got scolded.
Its structure is such that it says none of those things exactly. It’s phrased and punctuated so as to make nonsense, creating textual friction that prepares the reader who will to confront God unambiguously in what follows. The totalizing zaniness of the sacred registers when the guru retorts in so many words, “Show me where God isn’t.”
Balling up a fitted sheet and throwing it at the closet makes God is everywhere make sense. How does Frenzy of Exultations enter the picture? With necessary arbitrariness, of course, of a piece with fractious sheets. Podkowiński’s lavish, cheek-licking misfire of a painting is loved with lurid words by the poem’s speaker — foam “slips” from the horse’s mouth! — only to be slyly deadpanned with, “The woman appears hopeful.” Ride that horse to where it flies, hopeful lady! A key detail omitted by the poem is the engorged, retro-twisted eyeball groping her nakedness. You can see it here.
A.R. Zarif’s Podkowiński word-picture grips me in an ekphrastic inversion: I resolve to re-read (again) a favorite poem at my earliest convenience: Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven.”
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
