I.
Adam and Eve, coffee-colored people,
lolled on their bellies listening to waterfalls,
toucan squawks, and dinner always something
tasty (say pomegranate and trout). Lacking
tanlines, each found the slightly lighter
skin of the other’s eyelids lovely,
such featherweight striations. (Dawn:
gradual and of great subtlety its
pinks and grays, because Seraphim
pussyfoot, kneading the night away.)
Eve’s eyelids were gazed upon most intently
when she looked over her shoulder
with her eyes closed. Adam also beheld
what Shahrazad spoke: “When she smiles,
the corners of her eyes touch her ears.”
My wife has green eyes and rather large ears,
so large in fact they poke through her hair.
She looks like a mouse. All the beasts of Eden leap
and crawl, and the rarest quality in the raucous land—
the Serpent’s talk by comparison a used car salesman’s—
the rarest, subtlest quality, tenderness,
of many facets and azure toothpaste breath,
of eyelids pale as lichen and ears
turned pink by the setting sun.
Our son used to haul himself up
to the windowsill and wobble, watching
for his mother to get home from work.
The sky, charcoal swathes and streaks of red:
that’s when the light would turn his ears pink
and I would want to gobble him up!
I wanted to gobble up his mother too!
Me, I’m the hog-wild Tickle Monster, roaring.
Any notion of paradise that includes
a cracked-open pomegranate (seeds seeds seeds)
must also include that feeling, that greed
to grab the beloveds and hold them too tight.
It’s nuts, of course. It’s called “possessive.” But
it’s the star-crossed, stupid best I can do for them,
flesh of my flesh (crack their ribs and go
kiss kiss kiss) when I get that itch:
a prickle, a premonition:
one white pinfeather spiraling
down from the Angel of Death
to tickle the back of one’s neck.
II.
Mustn’t forget the rest of the story.
Mustn’t forget the Tree of Knowledge,
the Flaming Sword, and the Sweat of One’s Brow.
Mustn’t forget the other feelings, like pride and hate.
Nomads (herdsmen like Abel) still haughty, ad
hominem, to the hunkerdowns (farmers like Cain),
the hunkerdowns hating their trampled crops.
And if you take brother-against-brother to the Nth
degree, random hoofprints rebuking blithely
crops in rows, then the whole shebang
proceeds from bad to worse: the passing-throughs
vs. the property-holders, the tramplers
vs. the tenders. Where’s paradise now?
There are islands where scarcely anyone lives,
there are pages glossy as tropical foliage. And
Fletcher Christian’s most fetching descendant Darlene
(bucktoothed) does grin at me from the pages
of ARCHAEOLOGY magazine, the Bounty
tattooed on her shoulderblade in blue ink.
You’ve heard about the famous mutiny
but what about Christian being murdered
years later by a jealous Polynesian husband?
What’s the story there? In the picture
Darlene’s mixed blood seems to be
at peace. And me, my ethnicity’s prone to
freckling, to pinkness, but my wife gets brown.
“God” is a word that gets said. God. As always,
paradise plays out in private, in shades, with
tenderness and rules for violence between
the bodies. And it happens sometimes
that a person will murmur “Is that nice?
Is that nice?” But not nice is better. Not talking
is better, because the bodies bioluminesce.
They beam like the audience at a minstrel show.