The God and the Goat, by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

This poem feels both Christian and pagan. "Deliver me my skin" echoes "deliver me from sin," and the goat takes me to classical mythology. The language is unusual -- subtled as a verb, for example. But it's the sounds and the imagery, like nacre-gnarled and beetle-back sky, that grab me.

The God and the Goat

And then the goat said to the God,
Deliver me my skin. And He
Did. Then the goat said to the God,
Anoint me in my skin again.
—And He did. Then the goat said
To the God, Seal me in my skin.
And He did—. He salved the seams.
And subtled him. And Himself, too.
Call it unrecognizable
Weather: boiling snow sidling
Gilt cloudbanks; a beetle-back sky;
Nacre-gnarled écorchés of ought
And nought air; all caught in the thought
That we were the God and the goat,
Once strangers, now just strange, and bound
By the songs of Heaven and wound
That wing out from our one shared throat.




Baaa