Her Argument for the Existence of God

This one then: the

doctor, who of course possesses a foreign name, thus

                                                      gathering all our what

shall we call them our powers of foreboding in a single

 

sordid corner of

the morning news, contrived to miss the following:

                                                      eight fractured ribs,

three missing fingertips, infected tissue, torn and partly

 

healed again,

between the upper lip and gum and, this you have to use

                                                      your Sunday

finest to imagine, a broken back, third lumbar, which

 

had all

but severed the spinal cord leaving him “floppy,” or so

                                                      the coroner later

determined, below the waist. Now granted, she might not have

 

thought to expect

a wailing one-and-a-half-year-old to toddle obligingly

                                                      over the tiles nor

felt she had the leisure to apply her little mallet just below the

 

knee, we see that, but

we are not talking nuance here. The tooth he had swallowed, so

                                                      hard had been

the blow to his face—of course one had no inkling, that would

 

take some sort of

psychic or an MRI. But ulcerated lesions on the scalp and

                                                      ears? I tell you if

I hear once more how the underage mother’s underage boyfriend

 

suffered a difficult

childhood himself I’ll start to wreck the furniture. When I’m

                                                      allowed to run the world you’ll

have to get a license just to take the course on parenting and

 

everyone

will fail it and good riddance we’ll die out. But in the

                                                      meantime which

is where we’re always stranded and ignoring consolation

 

which is laughable what’s

to be made of the sheer bad fit? The reigning brilliance

                                                      of the genome and

the risen moon. The cell wall whose electric charge forms now

 

a channel now

a subtle barrier no modulating thought has thought

                                                      to equal. The

arachnid’s exoskeleton. The kestrel’s eye. And we who might

 

have been worthy but

for reasons forever withheld from us aren’t. Wouldn’t you

                                                      rather be damned

for cause?