Dawn of creation

With the swirl of a wrist and the twitch of an untamed brow
Rock rose out of ocean
And light met mountains in the sky
Shapes clung together in infant creation
Birthing chestnut trees and hearty ginkgoes
Ferns mosses and rose bushes
Finches horned owls and spotted newts
The world was the body’s work
The hand’s
The eye’s
But when the eye gazed on good work
It could not gaze on itself
Never would
Where birth cuts the body cannot mend
An outstretched hand not part of the world just because it cups a white rose
One in vision but two to touch
Always creating beyond the self
As if to say
This world
Once mine
I give
To you.

A shrine on an Ikea dresser

a shrine on an Ikea dresser urges me to stay
only yesterday it was not quite perfect
only yesterday I dug through still-packed boxes
to assemble
photos from 2005
a jewelry box, a keychain, a sticky note
nudging them
left and right
forward and backward
spacing one at the perfect midpoint of the others
calculating the angles between
dividing by the number of years since she died
and sighing
at last
when the equation balanced
only yesterday
did I look at my altar of curiosities
my curated constellation
stroke the glass over her glossy face
and feel that I could rest here

Cody is a DC-based, Iowa-raised researcher, writer, and artist.

Image: Secretlondon, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons