It Dawns On Me, or: Fun from Day 1, by Todd Boss

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.

Comments

[DL]

The rival stories of the creation of man and woman in Genesis I and II are also rich. And the idea that light, and the division of day and night, precede the creation of sun, moon, and stars, could be taken to support a theory of the clockmaker divinity who creates the machinery to keep things running -- though it makes me think of Freud's contention that originally one word designated both day and night. Faithfully yours, and with thanks.

[Maja]

To add: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God (or Creator / Artist / Poet) shall stand forever.
Isaiah 40:8
What else than the Word?! It, the Word, was in the beginning of all beginnings. It stands at the end too. Just to make the infinity loop perfect.

Yes, God is a poetic idea. God is created by an anonymous poet. God is the self portrait of a hyperactive, hypersensitive, lonely, longing, jealous, generous ...(fill in yourself) troubadour.

I love this story of the "world=garden=creation-in-7-days".

God - walking in his Eden and singing the blues.

Impossible not to get drunk with all the essences and elixirs, with all the images and thoughts! (Shakespeare, one incarnation from God's many - Shakespeare again! - gave the origin of the thought-flower-language with his Ophelia. Than another, the Swedish poet Harry Martinsson wrote that the scent of a flower was simply the flower's thought. And the composer Arvo Pärt says about his piece "Für Alina": every blade of grass would be as important as a flower... and the soul yearns to sing it endlessly. I recommend you to see also BJÖRK INTERVIEWS ARVO PÄRT on YouTube).

Berlin, 2.30 AM - there is a big party outside, the street ground is swinging with the techno rhythm, I'm going out sure to meet some new gods!

PS. mailing my post with delay of hours - today I got up very, very late - the party I went to ...