Creation myth

There’s nothing I can’t find under there.
Voices in the trees, the missing pages
of the sea.
—Li-Young Lee, “Pillow”

The trees rattle and whisper and shriek,
harboring in their leaves
messages we have forgotten we need.

Voices in the wind
reciting from the missing pages:

Sibilants and squelch, repeating
pebbles rolling in the surf,
salty bubbles evaporating in the breeze,
the hiss of foam collapsing,
sand sifting through the wasp-waist of time.

Missing pages torn away,
crumpled papers flung upon the wind.

It is written on the sea—
what we breathed before there was air
when we were not yet
a gleam in any eye,
single-celled, not even creatures yet,
but algae, boneless,
photosynthesizing the future.