Between Apple Pickings
A story that is more than a story.
Too many renderings to doubt
That something happened.
Too much similitude to deny
That there is but a single story.
One version says forty days poured rain.
Another says fountains split open the deep.
My imagination kicks in:
Waters flash-evaporated, fantastically-cooling,
By angelic dynamos,
Whisking an abyss through the ice and water
At the edge of the northernmost sea,
Nearly liquefy the whipped air as they tumble
Flash-frozen hapless earth-walkers and all.
The sky-bent waters hush to solemn snows returned
By angelic breezes
To entomb frozen earth-walkers strewed in a jumble,
The weight of snows turning lower snows to ice,
The jumble to be uncovered in the last of the devils’ days.
The angels are commended for the set-up run.
Next is found the jig for judgment,
A fount to feed the southern rain,
Unrelenting downpour down,
Which tumbles forty days on earthbound human populace
Peppered with the mighty ones and their half-breed bullies,
Augmented by an orbital of water droplets swept
By angelic sluices
To the o’erburdened sop above the b’devil’d place.
The runoff breaks upon the barrier
Of angelic sea-walls
Amassing water sufficient to top the mountains,
Held tight for half a year.
To whom does the story belong?
One hearer secures observance of its multiplicity.
Another engages the gift of the gathered parts.
The teller honors the sacred trust as do those who heed.
The cause of it all markets perusal
Shedding tears which pool
To mirrors of love.
I squeg in the reading of “the face of the earth,”
Or from the other story, “all flesh,”
Till I dredge up Occam’s razor
Telling me Everest did not command
Angelic attention,
Nor did any terra firma untrod by human foot
Nor any living thing not caught within the Zone,
And thus the telling mis-implies,
It seems,
The global scope.
The story began with a bidding in an ear
And continued with barks and brays and caws
Gathered to an ark
By angelic roundup
Sealed in safety
As Yahweh shut the door,
Serving, I glean,
To roll out Yahweh’s love
Quelling a wildness
After which the waters
Drained back to the seas
And the menagerie was loosed
Replenishing the losses
In hollowed Human Land,
The twos from the ark skipping free
As gifts to the Land Once Enveloped,
The gratuity smoking heavenward
To the Owner of all.
By Yahweh’s love
We ask our questions:
As the human race crackled in felling itself—
As it crackled in carnage of crowing or crowned—
Without robbing its trampled likeness to God—
Was a quietus required by love?
As the fewish angels deserted eons of love—
As they played for their pleasure the people—
Without closing the question of custody—
Was a ruling required by love?
As Yahweh contended a world awry
Could He not have just written the story?
What tangibility traced the hybrid flower
Of the fallen ‘sons of God’?
From where have come the frozen mammoths?
Whence the ancestral stories?
Dare we ponder a postlude?
—marshmallow demons flambé?
How is necessity not a lesson?
Lies the lesson in the telling?
—or the doing?
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