Since He took you away I still do no work,
and never break a sweat. Mostly I’ve taken
to making the animals mate for my amusement.
So I, like my Maker, have brought forth new life:
one creature, the mule, eyes me cantankerously
and resents being fed. I spend much time with it,
feeling like, somehow, it is our child. My other attempts:
trying to make a sheep that can both swim and fly
like my friends the ducks, and trying to make a dog
as smart as me, have been, ha, somewhat less successful.
I laugh at the matings, though, and laugh until my side hurts.
It hurts all the time since I woke up and you were gone,
and the new one came, who smiles a lot more than you,
who only picks at the food I bring her absently
as if her mind were in the farthest grove.
But she reclines beneath me, accepting what is dealt her.
You scared me, is all I wanted to say: I was still so young
and you drank from me like a tree; your toes, your legs
like roots digging into the ground as you swayed above me,
and I could not rise from the earth. Now I am there always.
