Creation Story

In one version a drunken angel shapes us from river mud.
In another the tou-tou bird sings daylight into being.
In another we fall backward from the sky into the earth’s net.
The other day goldenrod.
The other day red on the tests; her cancer like sumac, back
             again, inching down the ravine.
It’s October. A kind of paradise.
Gold hills, black walnuts, a flurry of gulls on open water.
Pasture thistle, evening primrose. Crows.
The other day at the sink a plate shattered in my hand.
Her husband has waited all these years for her to die
            so he could marry her sister.
In another version he marries her best friend.
In another she lives, knows everything, but says nothing.
The chaplain told her years ago, in her first fear,
             that death for a person of faith was just a beginning.
In one version the god of violence eats everything.
In another the life god sells us down the river.
The beginning of what?
The other day the ash tree lost its leaves in a single afternoon.
What's coming is January, the lake iced finally over.
What’s coming is this much light through a hole this small.
I gave my students this assignment: Tell your entire life—
             birth to death—in five lines, like that poem we read.
You can see where this is going.
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State.
And she feels like a woman she saw one day, stooped and tying
             her shoes on an escalator.
Absorbed like that but on deadline.
In another version they talk everything over and agree—about
             the sister, about whether they have bodies in heaven.
The other day the sun in its box of sky, a going away gift.
In one version I told them to make the rhyme ABABA; in another
             ABCDB.
In Texas, an artist has cast every bone in the human body
             into chromium, and will bury one in every country
             until he runs out of countries.
Shiva destroys the world, then gives birth to it.
Lingam and Yoni, male and female.
“From my mother,” one student wrote, “I inherited an estate.”
“When I died,” wrote another, “I went somewhere. Who knows?”
At the lake’s edge the sumac god descends the hill, disappears
             into water, then climbs out the other side.
In one version, saw-toothed sunflower, closed gentian, asters—
             autumn flowers that must have been there when God
             raised his voice.
In one version a Japanese girl falls through the ice and is resurrected
             as an island.
Everything must have been there: the plate, the cancer, the little
             scimitar scar I’m working on, my student’s dead mother,
             black flak, the speck, the mass, the caul, crows in the ash.
In one version nobody dies.
In another, everyone.