My bedside clock reads 1:58AM and sure enough: down in the moonlight stands my inner poet, drunk with dreams, lightly knocking at my outer door, his gardening duds on. I put coffee on for him, and we will sit together in silence awhile…
I’m thinking how richly comic it is that in the Genesis poem, God stocks the earth with biology on Day 3, then plants the sun, moon, and stars on Day 4.
The sun, moon, and stars are “to mark days, seasons, and years,” and yet haven’t we been marking days since Day 1 (Chapter 1, verse 1)?
I think of plants without daylight, moonflowers with no moon, “fruit trees” without seasons, deciduous forests biologically programmed to drop their leaves on some endlessly elusive “autumn day,” and, high in the Peruvian Andes, sweet-smelling banks of pink and purple four-o-clocks awaiting their hour…
And what is a Day, with no sun to mark it? An eternity, maybe. An abstraction, surely. Nothing, anyway, to be taken literally. Then again, this is poetry.
By now my readers know me as a believer, not in God as God, but in something even more divinely mind-bending: God as a complex and abidingly poetic idea; the God of rehab, experimentation, and anger management, who re-wrote his own vengeful story with the late-season planting of Jesus; God of the mixed message, the all-flooded do-over, and the garden in the seasonless Eternal.
Deciduous is from the Latin decidere, to cut or fall off. To decide is to axe or let drop.
We poets, who spend our days endlessly trimming edit upon edit, our little blooms pruned and shaped with minute deliberation, surely we must find sympathy with this God, or at least this idea of God, whose project was the timeless decision-making that unfolded the world, leaf on leaf, bone on bone. Whether you call it genesis or evolution, there’s an awesome god-like creative force at work between the sauropod’s erasure and the shih tzu’s introduction.
No matter how you mark your seasons, your inner poet must blush at the brilliance of the morning’s bloom.
Hang your lab coat on the door. The earth wants your fingers in it. There is no reasonable way to be human. Every day is deciduous. Literally, the world is comedy; figuratively ‘tis wondrous strange.
There is no faith but to flower.
