eve/ in exile

the garden was rented: in other words, it did not know how to mourn & would change instead. the trees yes the trees would go on breathing, the poison oak would choke the telephone poles, immense white roses festooning the airstream in slaphappy wreathes, the sun slowly unwrapping the white of the verandah wicker, like bandages.

everything: flimsy lids & thin folds/ everything: gone amorously to seed: good soil, sprout here. in the mesh & vagrant shade of sunfat firs, sweet death of leafmold & mackintosh & the last stubborn floorboards ript, uninhibited from temporality & man’s passion for nomenclature.

just listen: I was there, I remember birdsong & the sun breaking, many-fingered in the firs. god speaking to adam in a language such as lovers use: a duet in which there is no dominant gesture, only permutation & extension, the words shuffling helterskelter, inarticulate, a broken wing.

already adam was looking at a cow & thinking meat. turning the trees over in his mind, whose swift & terrible magic was in making matter matter as in so many ticonderoga per calocedrus. whose whole life had been surrounded by angels & endlessly dreaming, beautiful uncut grasses.

that’s right adam signed on the dotted line signed in a single stroke, aching with the loneliness of I. the world turned insideout emptied & we are left holding only the crumpled receipt. you see how easy it is, how necessary that I would have to get up on one elbow turn away from him yes, absorbing the terrible symmetry of the fruit trees

blank bride of the hour

she is twenty-five. sawing the plastic bracelet with a grapefruit knife. has the child enough teeth for an apple she wonders. adrift in the spectacular liquor, she refuses to be familiar with the choral warbling, pupils like blue flowers in milk, in its spilled blaze the stag—

she remembers how she sinned… it was so simple! the light begins its slow foggy wash over God’s visible kingdom: immense banyan tree, swimming pools & backyard citrus, in the second-hand sunlight low fragile houses advertising yard eggs crickets turpentine. where in the heavy delirium of beginning nothing moves but the coin of a bird

she is a guest. she is smashing icecubes with a wooden spoon. sewing sequins on the child’s witty improbable parrotgreen jeans, ecstatically ironing. of course when the baby was born there was no where to put it—

she has no memories. though she remembers the wedding clearly. it had taken place in a lush tropical forest with dinosaurs. the sun was bubbling at the end of the world. they had drunk a lot together & then fallen asleep, lovingly entwined in the brilliant epiphytes

she is waiting. Thanksgiving begins, with a terrific roar of shotguns. she is wearing a thin tshirt hibiscus shorts & sunglasses the colour of champagne bottles. her wrists are wrapped in calamine & Saran. there are clingpeaches & cigarettes & fireworks & ham, fisheggs in a sand bucket & tiny dead songbirds, clustered like grapes—

already she cannot remember him. putting on a facemask & looking at the baffled guileless heart of the sea, this necessary fiction—. the proof of the memory is scratched out by the charred antlers of your eyes. she will tell the child this, at any rate

she does not have to make anything of these moments. a man & a woman & a child scrambling from a torched trailer. fire licking the ground like a tomcat lapping at scraps. a thin lemon lake of brightness rises from the crimson ground—

she is a stranger here. hungry & dangerous. white nunca, red meat, a beautiful suitor. morning rises from the earth like an animal & it goes

committed to hurrying after it, alive—

we woke yesterday not in optimism but by accident, obeying our nature like the coyote or the sparrow always does. with the dream still in our eyes & the sloppy blonde light spilling across the hour & an electric waterfall onto the avocado pine secretary & a parrot singing in the gourd grown in a terra cotta mould, we were helpless the wings of our mind still flapping. we lay naked on the bed & the television [so clean & so light] arrived to us from other time zones, where we were wearing la marque roses on our lapels & shining, patriotic trumpets filled the air with ballooning birdlike song, reminding us it is morning & we are hopeful—on the brink/ brim/ cusp…

… take out your pen. begin. we. today, as yesterday, the hand-carved coyotes in the motel lobby are mutely howling, there are brave caring men with beautiful muskets & custom lawn irrigation systems making this great continent safe for wild boars, sugarcane & Mrs. Thompson’s Golden Free Peach, there are, for a modest sum, shrimps available on Midwestern menus, there are also Canadians who lease forty-six pristine lakes as real-world test tubes. seen from space with no detail of buildings the world is a stallion rolling in a pasture of blue ether & we are politics human hands. walking forward now in the shimmery, spectacular never-ending daylite of our twenty-first century world—