Dr Hughes' Tardis

There's been a run of quasi-theological noodlings of mine at this blog recently, so for a change, here's someone else's 'Theology':

No, the serpent did not
Seduce Eve to the apple.
All that's simply
Corruption of the facts.

Adam ate the apple.
Eve ate Adam.
The serpent ate Eve.
This is the dark intestine.

The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise -
Smiling to hear
God's querulous calling.

Part of Wodwo, this; though something of a companion piece to 'Crow's Theology' too; its eating (and being eaten) as the horizon of being is certainly corvine. Hughes told Ekbert Faas '"Theology" was a note for a poem, and turned out itself to be a better poem than I could have written at that time.' Keith Sagar calls it, rather admiringly, a 'blasphemous redaction of scripture'; but I don't see the blasphemy (perhaps I'm blasphemy-blind). Three kinds of 'being inside' are folded one into the other, Russian-doll-like: the way in which something I eat (an apple) can be inside me; the way a human (a foetus) can be inside a pregnant woman; the way we are ontologically 'inside' the cosmos. Of course it parses all three as types of devouring, but in that it's merely taking its cue from the Biblical original. And the cosmos that we are 'inside' certainly looks much smaller from the outside than it appears to us, here, on the inside: it is Tardic, in that sense.