Tabatabai: "Adam to Eve in Old Age"

The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
– Milton, Paradise Lost

Dear Eve,

Many moons have passed
since that first day
we left the garden
with our heads hung low
and our shadows cast.

Remember how hot it was?
how thirsty we were,
how far we walked to find water and shade.

Remember that first night?
how dark it was,
how scared we were,
how naked we felt in our leaves.

And that first winter?
with its reluctant sun
and thickening night,
how we hugged to keep each other warm.

Many winters have passed and with each
I’m getting slower, and smaller.

We’ve been through much,
and I know it wasn’t easy for you.
I still regret the way I treated you
when he yelled at us
for eating his fruit.

I knew you needed
my sympathy and support
but I called you stupid
and you cried.

I wish I had held you instead
and kissed your head and told you
it would all be fine.
I wish I could have stood up to him.
I wish we had taken a whole basket of that fruit.

I remember the first time
your belly swelled.
I was nervous because
you screamed and screamed
and I thought I would lose you
and be alone,
but a child was born.
And he drank from your breast
and he clung to your skirt
and we learned life.

I know it was hard
when we lost Abel,
and we lost Cain,
and we learned death.

For the longest time
you wouldn’t eat, or talk, or touch.

But we’ve had good times too.

Remember that first spring?
the way it smelled,
the way we felt,
as if we’d never left
that long-forgotten place.

Remember the time we drank
from the vine we grew
on the trellis in the back?
You laughed because my eyes turned red
and my teeth turned blue.

That was the night I discovered you,
the night I smelled you and tasted you.
I realized how you squint when I kiss you,
and blush when I watch you.

That night I found your nape
and the curves of your waist,
and those two dimples
low on your back.

And you showed me the things a woman can do.

It has ceased to be that way
with me and you
for a long time now—I know.
But when I look at you,
with your gray hair and wrinkled smile,
I still see that wide-eyed girl
trying to cover herself with leaves.

As we reach the autumn of our lives
there is nothing I want more
than to sit by your side
and hold your hand
and listen to your voice.

My beautiful Eve,
my love, my life,
I thank you for giving meaning
to my mortality.

*

From the collection Uzunburun, Pen & Anvil 2011.

Eve's Fall, updated

Speaking of vipers, and of updating old books into new systems. Pamela Garvey's poem "Eve’s Fall Through Technology" was a Tuesday Poem feature on 3 Quarks Daily. Here's Section 3, "The Fax":

Enclosed is my confession. Read it over, sign, date, and send back ASAP.

The serpent wound up
my inner thigh.
Risk-taking was my halo,
paradise calibrated.
He tore the seam between us.
I know you are hungry. I know
you are lost. My days
are a frayed immersion.
I peel and core and slice
apple after apple
to taste their rot.

We owe so much to old Eve, taking it on the chin for so many ruined generations. Many thanks to Shanna Slank for turning our eye to this poem.

*

Sassan Tabatabai -- like Keith Botsford, a contributor to The Charles River Journal -- himself has a well-tuned poem returning to this Biblical trope, "Adam to Eve in Old Age". This poem will appear in his first poetry collection, Uzunburun, will be available this September from Pen & Anvil.

Kinglsey Amis: "Something Was Moaning in the Corner"

O muskrat, ramble through the living grass
And coil the leaves on the abandoned bone;
Bring to the midden your eliding grease
And load the summer zephyrs with your bane.

O viper, mad with coiling on a pin,

Deadly Narcissus gazing on your scales,

Vomit your naked young sentenced to pain

And learn to love the bad sun where it scalds.

O spider, crawl into my tiny heart

And find your doom. The blood is vacant there.
With needle legs prick my dull skin apart
And build your web of sweet inhuman hair.

*

One of several experiential elements which have not yet been translated from physical libraries to e-reader storefronts and other digital spaces (I'm looking at you, Cushing Academy) is the likelihood of serendipitous discoveries brought about by catalog propinquity. Case in point: I was looking for a Kingsley Amis novel not too long ago, and happened to find on the library shelf in the same section, the thin volume which I have since discovered is relatively rare: Bright November, Amis' first collection, published by The Fortune Press in 1947, and from which the poem above is taken. A neat thing, -- imperfect to be sure, but full of Positions and Perspectives which would get a newly-minted MFA in trouble now-a-days is he or she tried to thicken a first manuscript with them.

from "The Knife" by Keith Douglas

This I think happened to us together
though now no shadow of it flickers in your hands
your eyes look down on ordinary streets
If I talk to you I might be a bird
with a message, a dead man, a photograph.

*

This is the last stanza of five; a full text version appears here but it is not clear whether this is an authorized source.