Auntie Deluvian
Deep-time they called it when King Dumuzid the Shepherd
lost a flock in the megafauna. Pre-flood, when man was less arrogant
about weather, Let us pray. When man lived and lived and lived –
who knew what happened to the women who were begetting?
Sooty hands graffitied caves, the fossils dug and worshipped
when Auntie Deluvian wore the apron, she who raised her head
and rattled wherever the Fall was mentioned,
fossils awaiting the clock of civilization and its shovels.
He gathered the waters of the sea as in a jar;
He put the deeps in storehouses. The deeps mean more than one,
mean a deep-time that sinks bodies with rivulets of chronons,
a type of time-travel, discontinuous. Fiery asteroids,
icky plasma, my friend’s stage four cancer –
Alien On The Ark: Two by Two
Curiosity is motive enough, a whole civilization (we use forks)
curious enough to admit him to this boat, a blind alien
who only says he can’t see. What is seeing anyway,
light that not everyone gets? A kind of understanding.
The sea is another civilization’s (we use knives) way of looking:
wet. Alien man stage right, oars in hand. A woman exits the head.
It’s dark. The man hits a beam with an oar to show he knows
what’s important and the woman approaches the forepeak,
having felt for the latch, stepped over the threshold he could trip over.
Behold! says the woman, robed by ethnic choice.
Her exclamation has to do with the hold and holding (desire),
because she takes him before the waves do,
before the applause dies from the unseeing ocean,
and the oars are dropped, and the light.
Does he have feelers or feelings?
An understanding is what she says.
