Gnosis, Repression, and the Return of the Unnamed: Psychoanalytic and Gnostic Themes in “A Strange Hatching” A speculative cosmogony in which consciousness emerges through exclusion, repression, and the return of what has been banished. “A Strange Hatching” presents a revisionary creation myth in which the origins of human consciousness are inseparable from exclusion, violence, and the persistence of an irreducible remainder. Drawing simultaneously upon Biblical narrative, Eg

A Strange Hatching Once there were other gardens, other plots, Other clots of clay. The old gods remembered. Cast from their temples, stripped of tribute and gilt, They kept their camp beside the pagan Nile. Then they beheld a land of light where nothing hissed, Nothing slithered or slipped, Nothing crawled or slunk through sedge and reed. The old gods smiled darkly. The maker had forgotten scales, Forgotten fang and feather, Forgotten fin, fluke and claw, Forgotten the sly

Expecting nothing but laughter and applause, Adam hears on all sides sounds of derision, Harshly sibilant. All were transformed to serpents

On the Presence of Being Everywhere [poem] Christ the child is a dry rib in God's hand. Sinew is drawn tight, tissue and flesh fashioned Into solitary boy-shape. Left to roam The fields of heaven, he falls Down God's high hill. He stumbles with the thunder, Falls with the rain, is borne upon the wind. Finding his tribe inside the Levant, he regales them With legends of Jonah; Comforts the bloodied lamb, Frees the gasping, netted fish; yet still he descends Through

Pictures of Eve I Adam cultivated Eve by swelling her belly with something so potent that it could only have come from the stone of a forbidden fruit. II Eve was striding the earth when Adam emerged from a black gap. Six days passed and earth was reduced to a pile of newsprint. And Eve tore her clothes and made for herself a garment of lamentations. But Adam, sated and pitiless, scoffed her beneath the absent apple tree.

On the Seventh Day On the seventh day God came down, dug earth deep and wide, buried Adam in the belly of the planet. From his grave came flowers and fruit trees, valleys and hills, rivers and seas, fish, lizards, birds, mammals, humans – lots and lots of humans. Seven million years later Adam awoke from a nightmare of holocausts, rape rooms, train wrecks, the rape of Eve. But being stuck in the belly of the world he could nothing but grind his jaw and weep for eternity to en

The Family Way Eve lay down and trembled. Her belly grew fat like the moon. Her womb conspired murder. Cain was gloomy at heart. Abel and his animals inflamed passions on all sides. Cain looked up and the sky shivered grey. Sin flew out the door of heaven. It stuck in Cain’s gullet like Aaron’s rod. Cain slaughtered his brother like a goat. He trembled as wiped the gore on his father’s coat of skin, which still carried the aroma of grandfather God.