Revisionist Poetry – I knew a God…, v7: An absurdist version – in the style of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics

Before I knew a God (a small cosmic report)

Before I knew a god there was a river —
not content with flowing, it kept minutes: payroll, ledger, current accounts.
I leaned my ear to its transaction (it hummed in prime numbers),
and the lark — hired that morning as a punctuation mark —
sang a footnote so precise the clouds corrected their margins.

Before I knew a god there was a star,
a single page in the sky’s interminable notebook.
It scribbled colour in the margins (helium in blue ink),
and I read until the ink ran like a sentence becoming weather;
the last page stapled itself to the moon and mailed me a receipt.

Before I knew a god there was a rose,
a small conspiracy of petals testing gravity’s patience.
Its scent wrote memos on the backs of bees; fate, in a cardigan, stamped them “OK.”
I pinched the air (economy of touch) and cupped a dew that counted as change —
it chimed like a tiny coin saying: this will do for morning.

Before I knew a god there was a thorn,
which introduced itself as an experiment in sharpness.
Migraine arrived (on time, with a brochure): “How to be a doorway.”
I let the ache catalogue my ribs; it rang up an invoice for bravery.
At the end, life and I signed in triplicate — the clerk (very polite) bowed,
and God, apologizing for the delay, handed me a song wrapped in paperclips.