God didn’t like his skinny legs
and made better ones for mankind from
red meat, collagen and calcium.
Just like that. Shorts followed.
Later, noticing
the way his creatures idolised
a certain thickness of thigh,
he tried to say – no,
no: that wasn’t what I meant.
Love the sturdy. Do, please. Be
my guest: all I wanted was a chance
to stand on feet at a normal distance
from my hips, and walk
towards the unexplained cow
on a beach looking at her shadow.
Sometimes I think these things
up and then I’m stuck with them.
But he couldn’t speak. It felt wrong.
He withdrew into the singing cloud
and measured his desolations.
Will Eaves is a novelist, poet and associate professor at the University of Warwick. His latest novel, Murmur (Canongate), won the Wellcome Book Prize.
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This article appears in the 19 Feb 2020 issue of the New Statesman, The age of pandemics