The Creation

was going well. A perfect, rosy sow, a finch, an elephant. Then a giraffe at the last minute, springing up like Wow, an exclamation point on legs. A gaffe, or maybe not. Her fringy eyelashes. Her voice, a bleat soft as a low laugh, a yard-long tongue that blackly licks leaf caches from the sky. She nuzzles her newborn calf still wet, eyes shut, legs splayed and sliding, the two of them improbable riffraff of the imagination, hang gliding off the cliff of reason.

  Oh giraffes, wear your head lamps, gather around, remind me, when all seems dark and sane, of mystery.