The Accident

The creator who dashed off a bird, who snapped his fingers over the waters, and—

Holy shit. What is it?

A fish, He said. A lot like a bird except it swims.

He’s sotalented, the other gods said of Him. But

that wasn’t it. Like

the coffee of my subconscious spilled all over my wedding dress, looking down from such a distance: What the poem must have looked like on the page to the student assigned to read it, who

could not read, and the way

it took me all semester to understand what he was faking, because the others, who seemed to read, seemed also not to understand.

Still, I should have guessed. Not

understanding made them angry, while he kept raising his hand to give me better, stranger

answers to my questions:

Consider daffodils. Consider cancer. Consider certain tiny lizards, and that long before anyone could count there was still math.