I wrote the first draft of “Almanac for Nonbelievers” at a borrowed kitchen table in Vermont, staring out at the ridge above a neighboring field. I grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia but have spent most of my adult life in coastal New England. I was happy to be back in a place where mountains describe the horizons. (So happy, in fact, that I agreed to move to Vermont a few months later. There were reasons other than mountains, but still.)
The poem is the result of a typo. I was writing a quick first draft, not trying to shape the poem, just wanting to get a nice flow of words down the page. And then I wrote the word God instead of gone. I stopped.
I am not a religious person. I have never been a religious person. But even I know when the word “God” shows up in a poem, only a fool would take it out.
The poem had (has?) always been about mountains and how humans experience the world versus how a smaller, less wordy animal might experience the world. But the typo expanded it into a contrast between how one person might see a mountainside while another person might see God.
This is what people mean when they say a poem has a life or a will of its own. “Almanac for Nonbelievers” led me into territory my conscious mind never would have gone on its own.
Image credit: Cindy Levin