CHRISTIAN WIMAN

"All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs 

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All my friends are finding new beliefs.

This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees. 

In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew

   God whomps on like a genetic generator. 

Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon. 

Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine.

   One man marries a woman twenty years younger 

and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant;

   another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles 

into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases 

like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea, 

decides to die. 

Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees, 

high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt,

   sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of  being … 

All my friends are finding new beliefs 

and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track 

of the new gods and the new loves, 

and the old gods and the old loves, 

and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives, 

and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness

and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends, 

my beautiful, credible friends.