Monday, July 24, 2006

It's Not You, It's Me

Nature abhors a vacuum
but God loves a good vacuuming.

The garden was strewn with petals
and those whimsical helicopter seeds
so God created woman and watched
as Eve unwound the cord, plugged it
into the slot between good and evil
and tidied the foot paths
while all the animals sat there, dumb,
and when she was done

somebody got out the apple juice and spilled
somebody opened a box of crackers
somebody trimmed his nails without a thought
for collecting them in his palm

and after however many days of consecutive Eden
Eve said I gotta get outta here and she did
and the cord snaked after her.


— from Famous, by Kathleen Flenniken
winner of the 2005 Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry

5 comments:

sam of the ten thousand things said...

This is a wonderful read. I really like the third stanza. Flenniken has done a wonder here. Thanks for posting.

Pamela Johnson Parker said...

Oh, my. I'm ordering the book, based on this alone. Thanks for the post.

Billy Jones said...

Howdy Peter,
Pardon me for being off-topic but I wanted to invite you to submit your blog's RSS feed to Poets101.com-- the world's only full featured poetry aggregator.
Thanks -Billy

Peter said...

S, P: Glad you enjoyed.

Marcail said...

A wonderful poem --full of delightful images. Thanks for the post