The Earth

God loafs around heaven, without a shape but He would like to smoke His cigar or bite His fingernails and so forth. God owns heaven but He craves the earth, the earth with its little sleepy caves, its bird resting at the kitchen window, even its murders lined up like broken chairs, even its writers digging into their souls with jackhammers, even its hucksters selling their animals for gold, even its babies sniffing for their music, the farm house, white as a bone, sitting in the lap of its corn, even the statue holding up its widowed life, but most of all He envies the bodies, He who has no body. The eyes, opening and shutting like keyholes and never forgetting, recording by thousands, the skull with its brains like eels- the tablet of the world- the bones and their joints that build and break for any trick, the genitals, the ballast of the eternal, and the heart, of course, that swallows the tides and spits them out cleansed. He does not envy the soul so much. He is all soul but He would like to house it in a body and come down and give it a bath now and then.