How the world was made
In the beginning,
the walls were bare.
Then the Universe
touched Her spine
with a hand She’d made
and given to a stranger, a mage;
he drew light from the deep well
overfilling his cup
distilled with an alien pomegranate nectar
from the third star behind Sirius,
a dark root,
a channel,
he opened up.
She spread her mouth in ecstasy
and a thousand orange fishes
swarmed the room,
a throat song of sea creatures
populated the walls, the window ledge;
light-eating sea cucumber,
swimming high translucent corals,
hair-finned radiant, absinthe-green underwater beanstalks,
aquatic hyacinthe and sapphire sea-snakes,
pulsing crimson water roses, honey-coral brain rock,
dragonfish with their undine wings–
the madness
of the oceans
in a birthing tidal wave.
The walls now peopled with rainbow-writhing,
(stones filled thick to the brim with living songs and siguls
dressed in water-blessed bodies, climbing, singing,
swimming weightless in Her room)
began to crack; waves of stone
fell away, under Her lover’s fingers parting,
fell away, the cold and barren and blank,
fell away, the sadness of the long forgotten,
fell away, that material vessel of the alchemist’s keeping
fell away, the towers of man.
And She smiled. And it was good.
In the Beginning,
the walls were bare.
So the Universe
tore them down.
