lights and water

On the Seventh Day

Lorna Crozier

On the first day God said
Let there be light.
And there was light.
On the second day
God said, Let there be light,
and there was more light.

What are you doing? asked God’s wife,
knowing he was the dreamy sort.
You created light yesterday.

I forgot, God said. What can I do
about it now?

Nothing, said his wife.
But pay attention!
And in a huff she left
to do the many chores
a wife must do in the vast
though dustless rooms of heaven.

On the third day God said
Let there be light. And
on the fourth and fifth
(his wife off visiting his mother)
When she returned there was only
the sixth day left. The light
was so blinding, so dazzling
God had to stretch and stretch the sky to hold it
and the sky took up all the room--
it was bigger than anything
even God could imagine.
Quick, his wife said,
make something to stand on!
God cried, Let there be earth!
and a thin line of soil
nudged against the sky like a run-over snake
bearing all the blue in the world on its back.

On the seventh day God rested
as he always did. Well, rest
wasn’t exactly the right word,
his wife had to admit.
On the seventh day God
went into his study
and wrote in his journal
in huge curlicues and loops
and large crosses on the t’s,
changing all the facts, of course,
even creating Woman
from a Man’s rib, imagine that!
But why be upset? she thought.
Who’s going to believe it?

Anyway, she had her work to do.
Everything he’d forgotten
she had to create
with only a day left to do it.
Leaf by leaf,
paw by paw, two by two,
and now nothing
could be immortal
as in the original plan.

Go out and multiply, yes,
she’d have to say it,
but there was too little room
for life without end,
forever and ever,
on that thin spit of earth
under that huge prairie sky.