for Jack Miles

In the beginning, God talked to himself.

“Let there be light,” he said.

 

His words were simple, his

sentences declarative.

 

Let there be this and that,

and it was so.

 

Finally, he made “mankind,” a pair,

in his own image, male and female.

 

In those first days, he walked

in the garden in the cool of the day.

 

Barefooted, in the garden,

on breezy afternoons talking to Eve and Adam.

 

Those were the days before farming,

before thistles and thorns.

 

Those were the days before poetry,

and poetry, alas, begins with a curse:

 

And dust shalt thou eat

all the days of thy life.

 

And the beat goes on . . .

The grass divides as with a comb.