Gaea
She was older than the dust around the sun
that eventually formed the planets,
nebulous, chaotic, like a dancer intoxicated
by an urgent and irrepressible creative thrust.
I am the result of a kind of condensation,
she said, particles coming together, coalescing;
like you, perhaps, like the fortuitous union
of diploidal cells.
That makes you
Mother of Everything, I declared,
really delighted by the idea.
And you’re really a schmuck, she said.
You’re like all those others: alleged scientists, journalists
who come by, snooping,
and those psychologically oriented tadpoles
who think they’ve got all the patents on Truth,
sticking their noses in
to where they don’t belong.
So that’s where I backed off. Right then,
and she went away,
leaving her drink on the bar.