eve

it’s a lie they tell
about eve’s eyeing the apple.
no snake at all
but the singing in her ear
a jay’s shriek from the tree
ripping the curtain
of dull selfsatisfied paradise.
and her plucking the apple
tasting the juicy white flesh
hidden within the red skin
juice running down her chin —
that was all adam would need
to truly see her — revelation —
not the perfect surface
the harmony of limbs,
chaste milkless breasts,
but the juice within,
the mystery, unknowable,
hunger, unleashed,
calling like the jay
still high in the tree,
a steelblue knifecut bird
shredding the curtain of dull paradise.

and when he sees her then,
her once placidly flowing hair
now restless curls gone bloodred,
her milkwhite skin clouded
in a fog of earthy freckles,
geese floating between them,
like her, ready to take flight
at any incautious approach,
her seagreen eyes tell him
you know nothing of me,
i am the forest and the sea
i am the haunt of beasts,
my skies are crossed by longwinged owls
whose talons, whose curved beaks,
glisten in the bloodred setting sun,
menacing and alluring,
and in my nights
wolves howl a raucous music
that if you listen,
if you let it in
will unleash the wild in your heavy limbs,
starting you to run.
let it in,
and your bounding feet,
no ground underneath them,
will kick up the cold snow of certainty
into clouds
never seen in eden,
clouds of hungry unknowing
whose song, like the wolves’,
like mine, is a call
to a hunt with no prey but the hunt.