(a trifle)

I.

So this is how
Adam knew Eve;
The moon was golden and the time
Of cities had not come upon the land.
And the great truths of love would burst
These pigeon-lungs; forget the rest,
And hold that blesséd vision to your breast:
Our first father was a good man that loved his wife.
I saw it once, the builders with the stones
Upon their backs like bees with pollen on their fur,
The city on the shore of a white lake
Which they would found because it was their fate.
The moon was just as golden as before;
And they all blamed the fixéd orbs
For this or that, the lust and murder in the blood,
Like as a fox that blames the rabbit for its taste.

II.

I have not set my hand against
A mighty thing for I have feared
That it should wither or be blessed;
Right well I understand
The future-tense is wound
Like the fisherman’s rope around
Even the blind man’s sense of touch.
Pregnant with all that follows from
Eating out o’ the bowl or beating the drum
I can but lay upon the stretcher born
By a sheep and a goat that share a horn
Pink as the inside of a clam,
Sick to the stomach from the churning of
Those wingéd wheels and their burning eyes;
I was too young to sing the song they sung
When Job grew holy on his seat of dung;
I say again that Gratitude
Is the long-lost Edenic tongue.

II.

Where I was born
Would be a lake except our fathers raised a dam;
Yet salmon come
Into their longed-for angelhood
When they submit to death upon a stone;
Thank God, I can take this to heart,
That if I must become a beggar on the street
I can but press my ear to the twelfth gate
And hear the children in the apple-blossoms
Singing the cantos that the older gods forgot.
One cannot move as slowly as he ought;
He pressed himself between the drops of rain,
Lithe as the hair bow of a violin;
He is as dry as the fourth element.
Adam knew Eve,
And this is how
We learned to write.