Everywhere you go is walking under heaven.

In those ruins east of Pusan Road

where the Shanghainese had homes before the Chinese Dream,

in that block of broken houses and farm fields run wild

locked in by that white-washed propaganda-picture-bearing wall,

there where old enamel floorboards

which were someone’s pride some twenty years ago

show a pair of foot-square patches through the rubble

like a pair of perfectly good teeth

from a skull lost in the grass in an old warzone

carried by the ants up on a hill

where on inspection by the ant officials who inspect all things

the teeth were found a useless kind of thing

and so they threw them down,
there God lives on Earth in China,

having left the West for good when finally it got to him

that all his warmth of love for all the world

cannot unsay the saying that

if God lived on earth people would break his windows.
But where is an almighty God supposed to live if not on Earth?

Is the Lord to live in outer space?

Shows how much you people love him!
So God went to live with the good old

domesticated and heartbroken Chinese ghosts and devils

(heartbroken at abandonment by their domesticating ones

who either never read the Little Prince

or never took it seriously

that we become responsible

for the ones we have domesticated)

and there God rented out a home

from the Howling Ghost Real Estate Agency,

a good brick plaster kind of home

with a second-story balcony and all

and a big vegetable patch outside

to potter about in late evenings after work,

last in line nearest the corner with the security booth,

and in the booth there is a paramilitary uniformed guard, guarding

(in case someone might come in order to disturb their dreams, I guess,

with foreign propaganda or a stolen parking space among the reeds,

or must not ghosts and devils also dream the Chinese dream?)

by staring at his screen-phone day and night, the ghosts and devils

who live in that long line of growling, moaning, doorless homes

windowless and full of shapeless rubbish

and dark, oy, when has it ever been so dark

except in the beginning, when the earth was void,

as they say in the book, and shapeless and the spirit of God

moved upon the surface of the deep?
Well, that was in the book, but in real life, a house

with a good wood door, a blue

screen-phone-colored light low in the second-story window,

white Honda sedan parked in the mud outside,

that strange security booth with the paramilitary black-shirt guard inside

installed in symbol of the senselessness of the primeval chaos

by the Bodhisattva who is boss of Howling Ghost,

and an unbarking St. Bernard dog running back and forth along the nearby river

which moves mysteriously like the spirit of God upon the waters:
this is how God lives now in a place

where at least they will not break his windows, where

when curious folks, strangers to the place, come stumbling in the heaps

of to the people once-important

now abandoned rubbish still important to itself,

he goes out on his Chinese motor scooter to investigate.
A balding short old village uncle type

you will not meet much off the mainland,

beer paunch, open black polo shirt

and friendly smile as easy to mistake for a policeman’s

uncomfortable tricks as he himself for a detective

in his black polo shirt with the big rhombus on the left side of the chest

which looks like a police badge in the dark.
And when he offers you a smoke

remember that we meet God’s face in every stranger,

remember and do not do as I did.

I with my fear

that every stranger works for the police.
Do not say, No need.

Just accept.