Eve Remembers the First Morning After Leaving the Garden
Descent
Cast Out
On the last day of April, flurries
Eve Letter: Slumber Party
Slumber Party, Details Changed to Protect the Privacy of the Guests
Lifted From His Chest, Now Does Penance
Bad Faith
When I Entered the Greenhouse
Reliquary
After the Funeral, the First Wife Tells Her
The Great Painters Show the Garden Behind Us,
Eve Remembers the First Morning After Leaving the Garden
To be honest, at first all I noticed was that the air was colder.
There were curtains, bedsheets. Drawers. We did not look
at each other. I felt flayed. He had not touched me;
it was as if I had been stripped bare and deserted by ease.
My skin felt raw. We put on clothes. I was hungry
and went to find something to eat. He followed; made coffee.
It was a day with gray sky. I was filled with regret,
and yet I found I could no longer remember
where we had been or why we had been asked to leave.
I put out bread, jam, cereal in a bowl. The paper. It was a day.
The dishes rattled in the sink, and we went to work.
The mindless drive down the parkway, the agile braid of cars –
but in the office stairwell, I noticed the red steam pipes,
snaking towards the compressor, the oddness of fluorescent light,
an echo of emptiness. I almost remembered. Then I turned
the knob, went out into the sunlight of the lobby, and forgot.
The sky was a void, and here was nothing
but diffuse light and rock to stand on.
My young husband was with me.
It was a vigil. We were nowhere
in particular. I needed to watch, closely,
to try to understand what were we waiting for --
were we going to die? I could not fathom it.
Then, abrupt, as if a trap door opened,
I was not there, anymore -- I was alone,
engulfed in warmth, in body, tangible
as being underwater, or wrapped
in stippled leaves, or in summer – I was
changed into myself, uniquely focused
on what-all pleased me right now –
the ripe peaches, perfume of peonies,
that man over there, my hair.
(with a line from Adin Steinsalz)
Although we begin to find our bearings,
our sense of exile never leaves us –
We want to sound the prime intervals,
but instead, we walk down Fordham Road
dodging fruit stands with overripe
tomatoes, men in tank-tops,
Carnicerias – and hear dissonance
leaking through our teeth.
Crowds – always. Ourselves –
unnoticed. Shorn of understory.
Bereft of a lilt
we can’t reclaim from asphalt, We keep
looking: smell the tar of endless
roof-tops, feel the air
sweat. One day, our eyes land
on an art opening opposite
a drug hole; the next, on a pair
of white-haired Polish sisters
leaning out the window of their brick
walkup. Every single day,
people shove past the armory,
past each other, shunning eye contact –
The self has no anchor.
Our bodies – laced tight.
On our best days, we face the world
deliberately unanchored,
watching ourselves bob like flotsam.
On the last day of April, flurries
fat as coins
batten the lake
a pair of loons – mated for life –
silver the water
I look for myself
as if inside
a darkened room
a bird
beats
upon glass
After The Madonna of Humility with the Temptation of Eve (c. 1400)
by Olivuccio di Ciccarello
Dear Holding-The-Fruit,
In the fresco you’re on the floor,
practically beneath the bed.
Your naked beauty not less
than blue-robed Madonna’s –
but she, dreamy-eyed,
sits cushioned, nursing her toddler.
Aura of gold. It’s a surreal sleep-over
for you, no less golden, wanting to be in.
And the serpent coiling up the leg
of the bed has a tiny human head.
Your up-tipped face – tight with intent –
you grip but never glance at a small
brown apple, poised by your chin.
Snake tail twists around your legs.
For how many years have you tried
to make sense of the shunning?
Slumber Party, Details Changed to Protect the Privacy of the Guests
Homely, we thought, and small; three years
too young. We did not want the scrawny
sister foisted on us by her mother to sleep
with us. We schemed to hypnotize her.
My thumb, pressed heavy on her forehead,
near her eyes. My friend intoning, watch the watch,
little sister, mind the golden watch, with steady
certainty for an hour as the time piece swung
its pendulum arc. We two,so eager for night’s
shared confidences, to tell and hear secrets,
how the minister had kissed my friend –
(his wife, so sickly). But sister did not submit.
Lifted From His Chest, Now Does Penance
After The Book of Adam and Eve
Sorry for myself?
And sorry for him, down there
on the river bottom….
Currents swirling.
I hear him. He cannot keep
his words inside his mouth, he
cries out to the river,
calls to eels and leeches,
fish and frogs to make
a great circle
around him, pray for him,
mourn his lapse –
and they do.
Even the currents stop.
While I, forbidden to speak, do my own penance –
Balanced, silent,
on a boulder, neck-deep
in the icy river.
My breath, a gasp.
After The Temptation of Eve, by Gislebertus. 1130 A.D. Cathedral of Saint-Lazare in Autun, France.
Dear Listens-To-Snakes,
my sweet persimmon
sorry for him
a bus driver
his dingy shirts
his lavish tongue
You weren’t trying to be friends like that.
How your ashamed hand
wheedles past line of sight
palm cupped for the fruit.
Blue spires of flowers
thrust upwards like swords,
and the spiky leaves
of succulents, larger
than lizard tongues,
more armored than
a turtle carapace,
and the air so heavy
and scented, the pools
of water scummed
in green; pots toppling,
or thrust under a table,
their reedy occupants
forced to press
upward against a roof;
exotic euphorbias
in raucous green,
and the endless grind
of the ceiling fan, all else
silent; then I wondered,
was living really like this,
and why had I not known.
A knocking racket, a prying whine,
and when I turn,
I see my husband, locked
in combat with the old dishwasher
wedged beneath
the counter, prying it out
for diagnosis – revealing
a snarl of copper pipe
and something else –
he reaches in and plucks out
one, two,
three ossatures –
each delicate as new grass,
fine as gold wire,
lighter than a puff
of milkweed – the bones in his hand –
clean and decades past
flesh and fur.
Pale spine and rib cage, legs and feet.
Odd how this brings
a sense of fealty
towards kinship, empathy for mice –
ephemera tumbled
haphazard in a cup.
After the Funeral, the First Wife Tells Her
It’s ok that you told them
he was a pompous ass—
it was true. Warm-hearted
but prim, that was him. And you
weren’t unkind. You earned it,
taking the heat for me. When we met
at nineteen, I was a new wife.
I was a wife, which was a mistake.
I told him so, but he didn’t get it.
How could he? I had to get out,
and I did, and you stepped in—
Endless thanks, friend.
I understood our collusion much
later. I went to your wedding;
you, to mine, my second.
It was familial. Later, you continued
to confide. The happy things.
But also, his affair. That he ate
and drank so much he wrecked
his liver. That he forgot. The scams.
Incontinence. His sense of ease
that all was well. But the end
was quick—one long sleepless night.
After the EMTs had gone and you
were alone, why call me first? I guess
you knew I loved him
once. Or had to tell me how
much it cost to honor vows. Who knew,
all these years, what our pact was,
or that we had one.
The Great Painters Show the Garden Behind Us,
and before us:
wilderness, dust, and sometimes, bones.
Wind swirling at our backs.
No gate.
But it wasn’t really like that.
It was exciting –
Everything possible.
Houses to build,
all the tasks to busy us,
farms and villages to found, and
the fact that
the mind
could be filled with verbs,
adverbs and clauses.
I say this now, after years
of forgetting.
Something
in the air this morning,
the russet bracts, the insistent greens:
apple, chartreuse,
reminds me of the supple breathing of that place,
of soil where nouns could grow.
Kathryn Weld is the author of AFTERIMAGE (Pine Row Press 2023) and a chapbook, WAKING LIGHT (Kattywompus Press 2019). Her poetry and prose appear in journals such as The American Book Review, The Cortland Review, Gyroscope Review, The Southeast Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. A mathematician as well as a poet, she is Professor Emeritus at Manhattan University. Her website is www.kathrynweld.com.
