Cosmogony
Cosmogony
Elizabeth Genovise
I.
As the candlelight flutters in the empty room
As the abandoned house is reopened
To the wet night and the amber moon
I find that in the years between my first
And last step across these battered boards
I have forgotten what it is to pray.
I have no tools and no furniture
No partner and no future.
Life has been bitter.
What shall I do with this white house
Storm-racked and flooded
On the banks of a Gulf-bound river?
Why should I have journeyed all this way
To key open a sodden door,
To walk these salted floors?
II.
It would have been easier to stay
As it would be easier now to leave
For behind me is relief,
An easy unearned peace.
Blaring from screens and shouted in the streets
Is this easy redemption, this seeming reprieve:
It is now possible to think of the happiness of men.
Only the old recall the cliff dwellings
And flinch
When the cathedral buckles, when the castle upends,
When a wisp of wind makes dominoes
Of a feeble Stonehenge.
I once saw trout in an underground lake
Swimming silver circles in the inky dark.
“Blind,” the guide told the children
On the clay-rimmed shore;
“Safe, but blind.”
Evolution fails to set asunder
Those above and those under
For each is possessed by a question
It is not done to voice
Each is longing for some Porfiry
To wrench his throat and ask
Do you flinch from the great fulfillment that confronts you?
But no one asks.
And here instead are the impostor myths,
Religions of ego and denomination,
Groupthink and regurgitation.
Empty of the transcendent,
They demand so little,
Only that we forget the fire through which
All things are renewed.
Religion need not be so ingressive,
They say, like a doctor who knows
You’re dying. Why trouble yourself?
It all ends the same.
I resent this house
For the way the green light shudders in
Through the musty blinds to land like fireflies
On the faded floors,
Even after a storm. It’s an aged hero
Grimy from battle, gaunt and gray
Having survived against all odds
To reclaim his kingdom once more.
It is my shame
That I want it to fail as I have failed.
What we suffer leaves its long beach
Of wreckage, every twisted branch an effigy
Of its former self. Here is both the angelic and the feral
Each stripped to the bones, each a rune
We ignore at our peril. I have eyed
These sad, tangled bits with rage
Have kicked them back into the waves
To punish them for what they are not.
But You—
You ask us to love them back to life
Redress loss with the carving knife
Sculpt the driftwood madness into birds
And words
That they might breathe, and fly.
There was a time when I felt I deserved this house.
Now, I’m afraid to lift the hammer and nails
Or stir the pail of paint.
Suppose the wood is solid and hale
Suppose the walls, once peeled and scraped,
Are a palimpsest of promises made
Back when I knew my way.
I’m afraid of the truth.
I’m afraid of the hidden door in the roof,
The secret staircase between me, and You.
III.
Oh, the audacity of the sapling Christ,
Who leaned into logic’s cold wind and said,
Before Abraham was, I AM.
It was only natural they were terrified.
And from then on they tried, as we try,
To bury the story behind a stone.
We post centurions on either side
Spelling one when the other goes home--
A caravan of guards stringing together the hours,
The months, the years. Tell us if the stone moves,
We say, knowing full well
That You are already here. Tell us if you see anything strange.
Yet each time You escape,
Each time the door is left ajar,
No one can find the guards.
Here is the axis on which all things spin
Here is the blueprint that built this house
To stand through floods and hurricane winds.
Is it possible that I could rebuild this house
Into a place worthy of You? The door in the roof
Is long sealed, yet sun and heat keep slipping through.
The stone has moved. For infinity without You is
Insensate, inert on the floor.
Let it lie.
Let the cycles perish, the logic die.
Open the secret door to sacred time.
I wish to crumble and be carpentered to life.
So let the cosmogony begin,
That I might make this house beautiful again.
Elizabeth Genovise
Poet & Writer
Elizabeth is an O. Henry Prize winner and her stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Pembroke Magazine, Cimarron Review, Southern Indiana Review, and many other journals. She has published three collections of stories. You can find her work here: elizabethgenovisefiction.org
Photography by Andrea Zanenga