Deborah Keenan
Not Finishing the World
I took refuge in a museum. outside the great wind mixed with water reigned alone from now on, shaking the glass panes. In each painting, I think, it's as if God were giving up on finishing the world.a fragment: The Museum
God's idea, to leave a million paintings and one planet
for humans to complete.
God's idea, to let living trees catch the dead ones, hold them
in their arms so they can do death together--finish.
God's idea, let humans invent every possible religion, every possible god--- this
amused
him, let him watch us practice
free will and rev our imaginations. We are amusing.
We resist seeing road kill, tyranny, good movies that might make us cry real tears, chemicals replacing actual food, big evil 'cause we think we can finish off small evil, warehouses full of beautiful elders who wished to leave long ago, animals we find unpleasant, not pretty enough, tyrants, then more tyrants down the road, then tyrants amused by our resistance, then tyrants no longer amused.
When God was puzzling over what he had created, was he so purely good he could only see the good ones, doing their good work ?
I don't know. My job every day: to make the list each morning of what I resist, and not be appalled to read it in the evening.
Deborah Keenan is the author of eleven collections of poetry and one book of writing ideas, from tiger to prayer.
The Saint of Everything, her newest collection, came out in the autumn of 2023 from Lynx House Press. She lives by the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, and she does not resist the beauty of those rivers, she does not resist the beautiful trees in our world.