Creation Myth

After Ken Burns’s Country Music, episode one

What if the world wasn’t spoken into existence
but sung, chanted, passed down?
Chicken one day, feathers the next.
It must have been obnoxious,
all that yodeling at the end of every sentence
while Experience coated the ground.
There was a time when radio
caused entire households
to dance right through the floor.
Maybe it really was all incanted or hammered out,
and then I came crawling, confused,
through a tobacco field in New York.
Spit ‘er up, Jimmy! my hand said to the Sun,
Why should the devil
get all the good tunes?