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.