It is Thursday, the fifth day of my experiment (see my first post for details), and last night the inner alarm clock failed to ring. I slept through the night, waking only at 5:45 to the sound of birds outside, nattering. It turns out I’m not a nocturnal animal. The cold overcast morning light is the light of criticism. What are you, then? it seems to ask.
My wife and I have not been getting along. It is like losing a best friend. We have been acting like badgers, coons, entrenched, all fang and claw.
I have baffled her kindness. I have spurned her gifts. I have treated her harshly. I have been critical of her. What are you, then?
I do not deserve her love, and yet… There is a place at the back of my neck. When she touches me there, all the hardness in my heart is softened.
On the fifth day, God created the animals. Tiny machines, gargantuan forms, coordinated flocks of awkward birds, each with a distinct tongue, a different lens on the world. Vicious creatures, many of them. Life-mating, some. Territorial, all.
Poets too crave animation. We speak of poems that live, that breathe, that leap off the page. If we could set down a poem in its elementals (two or three words, for instance, or a single halting image) knowing that in a million years its evolution would fill it out, armor it, make it tough, quick-witted. If we could open upon the planet a new species of poem, one that travels in herds or undulate schools… what artist wouldn’t desire this?
What are you, then, you poet of the non-evolving? Dusting for the fossils of even your most feral thoughts.
Last night, transplanting ferns in the yard, my daughter collected worms. I was given the quiet joy of telling her about regeneration: that a diced worm becomes two. “So, it’s true, then?” she said, apparently having heard the rumor already, perhaps among schoolmates. The rumor into truth evolved, and wormed its way across her open palm.
Perhaps by creating the passionate, territorial animals, God was healing his own exogenesis, clawing himself into his earth by proxy. In another Day, man would be his image, but in the meantime, and for millions of years, perhaps the animal would serve him as a narrative.
I want nothing more in this world than to reconnect with my wife.
And now it is 7:00, and the house stirs to life.
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