Adam Expelled

Written in Port Townsend, Washington (living with my mother in a little house behind her friend Peg Lewis’s), September 1984.  This was my response to a love triangle I’d very recently found myself in.  (The full quote from Adam in Genesis is “The woman tempted me, and I did eat.”)  I hadn’t used Biblical imagery in quite some time, but the topic seemed appropriate.  There are also echoes of Pueblo myth about the ascent of mankind from the “green, unripe” world to the “hard” world we live in now, thanks to Tom Alexander, who’d been studying it.  There may also be a hint of Paul Tillich’s doctrine, taken from Calvinism, that Adam fell by divine decree.  Published in my books Too Little to Kill and Wings of the Gray Moon, and in the online journal Fickle Muses.

Adam Expelled

                                                                                                            “. . . and I did eat.”

The garden ripened,

softness into toughness,

the drowsing seed into the dropping fruit.

Knowledge brought hardness,

sight showed the blatant contours of the world,

its balancing in an instant of space,

my blurred bemusement in it gone,

and circling everything the melancholic stain

like a hinge-jawed shining snake.

It was never innocence, it was greenness,

and it was not a fall, it was a purging of the eyes.

Decision watered the earth,

desire loamed it

and the fruit was in my hand.

Can I ask to be restored to that unfocused spot,

to be cradled in hugeness as if it were clarity?

I am larger than it now.

My own heart wields the flaming sword

I will not cross.