This Clumsy Living

A letter: the Genesis poem

44 A letter: the Genesis poem Hello. You’ve read your way into a time machine disguised as a poem inside a book called This Clumsy Living, a title taken from a Rilke poem. For you, it’s sometime after March of 2007, though the words you’re reading, such as that word “reading,” are being typed on May 23, 2006. It’s sunny here. On my desk, a Bible open to Genesis rests on a short story about a man whose son is heading off to Parris Island for basic training, which sits on a history of zero I printed out from a web site, which is on top of the book The Last Place on Earth, about Amundsen’s and Scott’s journeys to the South Pole. I’m thinking of writing a series of poems using only words in the first chapter of Genesis. “Then God creeps on the fruitful behold. Let us rule the expanse with seed and trees bearing darkness.” When I look up from the keyboard, I face a casement window that’s full of the Blue Ridge, that’s why mountains show up in many of these poems. And sky: thirty-three times. Is why: three of those. Because: twenty-eight. Altocumulus: twice. Twenty-three windows. We’re at war as I write. In Iraq, in case we’ve moved on to Iran by the time you read this. Most of the talk right now is about gas prices and illegal immigrants. Many people here don’t want elsewhere people to become here people. “And to every bird and evening cattle let there be yielding.” I write with an old version of WordPerfect that allows me to look at little more than a black screen with a blinking white cursor. I’ve been staring at that blinking cursor for some time, trying to figure out what I want to say about this book or writing poems or God or the defense department or Eve or my parents or the simultaneous cravings for order and disorder. I think trust is what I need to address. For me, that you exist, that my words are in your hands, that I’ve said what I’ve said, that I’ve been clear. Sometimes muddled clear and sometimes simple clear. That’s hard for me to believe, which is why I write so much, which is why this book, were it left to me, would be infinity pages long. Always the sense that “every night created him,” that who I am is just up ahead, looking back, saying “I have given you image in the midst of waters, and the waters swarmed formless and void.” Trust that faith needn’t be a weapon, a sharpened Christ or exploding Mohammed. That here or there is all the same whoknows. That words can change us. If you sit alone with words long enough, it’s easy to believe the mind in the moments of its conception, “that we might, 45 male and female beasts, give light and let birds fly from our living,” that mind doesn’t create a thing but is the created thing. So saying thank you, we are thanks, so kissing a thigh, we are the shiver. Whether I believe that or not, I want to, and the question, what is the definite thing I believe?, is in the Bible, in every book, atom, though not the answer. Answers aren’t so much fun: the hypotenuse, the Superconducting Super Collider. But what’s behind them—the need to cherish shapes, the smash and grab of physics—“God blessed them.” Trust in steps and reach. In failure. “And God created them in His own image; and God said to them, be fruitful and fill the light with darkness and the darkness with waters and waters with sky. Every thing has life.” This book, the mouth: openings into more. These poems are me looking forward at you looking back at me. Twenty-three windows, thirteen moons, thirty-two dreams. One instance of the cloud that is described as “small heaps arranged in layers or sheets.” A book of poems, “small heaps arranged in layers or sheets.” The poem of wondering right now who you are. 46 ...