In the beginning was the word, fanning out into syllables
like a deck of cards on a table in Vegas,
litigious leafy parts fluttering into atoms and cells,
genus and phylum, nouns, verbs,
elephants, orangutans, O Noah, you and your philological
filing and filling of arks, gullets, daughters.
In the beginning was the word and it was as big
as Aretha Franklin after “Chain of Fools,”
long as your mother's memory of all your misdeeds,
wide as Jerusalem, a fat-lady-in-the-circus word,
a Siberia, a steppe, a savanna, a stretch, a Saturnalia,
the party at the end of the world.
In the beginning was the word and we knew which way it went:
left to right in English, right to left
in Hebrew, an orientation so profound that sexual climax
is coming in all right-moving languages
going in those advancing left, though in the moment
we rarely know whether we're coming or going.
In the beginning was the word, small and perfect,
a Hans Holbein miniature, a dormouse,
a gnat, a bee, a blink, a breath in the lungs
of Jehovah, Brahman, the Buddha, Ra,
because all the big kahunas of the universe surfed
in on the crest of that first wave,
and Thomas Edison said let there be light
and the dinosaurs groaned in their graves,
and there was Albuquerque, late-night roadhouses,
blues, cigarettes, fish-net stockings,
high-density sodium street lights that blot out the stars,
cars, diners, the neon urban carnival before Lent,
and Marie Curie said let there be more light,
and there was radium, radiant thermonuclear
incandescent explosions, Herr Einstein's dream,
Herr Oppenheimer's furnace,
London burning with Hitler's fire, Dresden cremated
in the answering flame, Hiroshima mon amour.
I ask you, what is this world with its polyglot delirium,
its plain-spoken, tight-assed, stumble-bum euphoria?
Explain time, for I am fretting on the outskirts of Odessa,
with Chekhov, with Eisenstein, with ten thousand
martyrs of unremembered causes, and we are cold, hungry,
tired of playing Hearts.
Where are you, my minister of informazione, Comrade Surgeon,
Mister Wizard, Gino Romantico?
Can you in your lingo ferret out the first word? Inspect
your dialect for clues, my Marlowe, my Holmes,
your patois for signs, your pagan vernacular, your scatological
cant, your murmuring river of carnal honey,
for in the beginning there was darkness until you came,
my pluperfect anagram of erotic delight,
my wild-haired professor of vinissimo and mayhem,
emperor of Urbino, incubator of rhythm, bright-eyed Apollo
of the late-night bacchanalia, and there was music,
that heady martini of mathematics and beauty.
For I am empty, I am full, I am certain, I am not,
for in the beginning there was nothing
and it was blank and indescribable,
a wave breaking on the north shore of the soul,
but as every canyon aches for its sky, I burned for you
with a fever, with a frenzy,
I was a woman craving a blaze, a flame,
a five-alarm fire in my heart, in my bones,
my hair red as a hibiscus, like a burning bush,
I was Moses screaming at God,
filaments of flame eating my eyes,
my sex, the hard sweet apple of my mouth.