Art by Sophia Yi

At age eleven, Ezra calculated the age of the world

by summing the years before and since the Flood.

Its high-water mark fell above what he knew by sight:

blue night blotted out, the crest of East Rock whelmed,

that deer waterborne. He worked it all out on paper.

His mother had passed away in his afterbirth.

This news was given him slowly,

with none of the earlier scriptural surety.

It shone through him, like December light

through dun-white, chest-high grass.

His mother’s eyes were black, like his stepmother’s,

but inexhaustible. He knew this by asking his neighbors

and recording what they said.

In that doe’s eyes he must have seen his mother’s,

in the leaf she nibbled the dove’s sign of land.