Carmine Giordano
Genesis
In the end you wake up dreamless in the three o'clock dark,
your wife lying next to you, her back against yours in isolated comfort,
and the old dog at the foot of the bed rasping heavy in his sickness
his doom aching in your head, and you are that child again at the end of the long corridor
between rooms at the end of the world where there is no mother and no father,
and your arms and legs disintegrate like the ends of the yellowed newspaper in the old trunk behind the cellar door, and your north and your south and your east and your west vanish like your breath at the zero of that winter morning alone back there
at the beginning of it all in the empty yard,
and you flail out into the pointless nothing and the starving nonsense of your life:
the laceless shoes, the lost buttons of your shirt, the frayed bottoms of your pants, your thin hairs graying on the brush, the endless repetitions of your breath,
the endless ins and outs and ups and downs and the bore and blather of your tired words,
and you say,
Let there be beauty beyond this, and being beyond this.
Let there be endless and eternal laughter.
Let the hand of the father command.
Let the heart of the son be filled with bountiful and endless love.
Let the breath of their holy spirit spill out over the deep
and vivify and sanctify all being.
Let there be glorias and hosannas in the highest.
Let there be praise and adoration and blessing forever more.
And there was the first day of this.
Copyright (c)Carmine Giordano, 2005. All rights reserved.
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