After Ovid

Before sea, before overhanging sky, before earth

Everything was one nature turning in its sphere.
Call it chaos. A rude, indigestible mass,
Nothing at all at bottom, but an inert congestion
Within which move ill-joined discordant seeds of things.
As yet, no bright sun shines upon the world;
The moon’s waxing crescents do not grow;
No ponderous earth hangs in suffusing air; the sea’s arms
Are not stretched along the margins of the land;
And though there is dirt and water and wind,
Earth is unstable; waves, arrhythmic;
Air, unillumined. Nothing maintains its form.
All objects are at odds and within one body:
Cold fights with hot, moist with dry, soft with hard
And weightless things contend with weighty.