In the Museum of Creation
In the beginning is a dark room, a fiery ball
projected on a screen, the sound of keyboards,
hisses, bubbling, gurgling—all the sounds of creation—
as a voice speaks of the fallacies of learning
and of knowing. The ceiling pricked
with tiny lights of celestial bodies,
a papier-mâché moon,
planets painted with acrylic hang from the heavens.
One hundred and forty-eight days
it took to complete this room—one hundred
and forty-seven more than the creator.
I had lost my way at the turnoff to Abilene
adrift until Tierrasanta, passing a sign saying
the Life of Christ performed Fridays and Saturdays.
A drive-through attendant pointed
in the direction of the dinosaur fields,
where the fossil of a human finger
from a girl’s left hand
was found in Cretaceous earth.
In a vine-covered room Pterodactyl bones hang
from a cathedral ceiling. Trunks of prehistoric firs
rise from a bog garden
adorned with Venus flytrap and pitcher plant.
A snake—too measured in its movements to have tempted Eve—
coils behind a glass pane.
Giant Morphos pinned beside Swallowtails and Common Jezebel,
wings orange-tipped like painted fingernails.
A stream too small for Pishon or Gihon
cascades over fibreglass rocks.
Waist-high, Adam rises from a pool,
Eve beside him—her long hair laid across her breasts,
as though she already knew shame
before eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
Their faces amalgams of every tribe,
inner-city melting pots from which
the races of the world might disentangle.
In a room filled with monitors
the six days of creation are shown
on repeat every four minutes.
At the touch of a screen a woman appears
dressed in wheat-coloured cloth—
Mary with a California accent—
saying how blessed she was
to receive the Annunciation.
Press back and a monochromatic screen flashes green,
offering the choice of meeting Noah, Moses or Abraham.
In the gardens grow trees from each continent
and a petting zoo where a zonkey and a zorse are exhibited.
A child watches in awe, asks what each creature is,
her mother explaining they were bred that way
to create something new, as God had done.
Baffled, the child can’t find the words to ask
why man would make animals like this, to display,
as if fifteen-thousand kinds of butterfly
and four-hundred-thousand varieties of beetle
weren’t enough—leaving Darwin to discover sixty-nine in one day,
and ornithologists and entomologists years to categorise
and bring order to the products of creation.