To a Slide of The Temptation of Eve in a Lecture on Medieval Art

I was twenty when I first saw you—languid, almost
luxuriating in the shrubbery, an Eve as slender as I was then;

I saw you whispering to Adam behind your cupped right hand,
while your left hand, with an independence of its own, plucked

the fruit. A presence lay over you like a sheet—that split
awareness—even as you fingered the fig, sensing the fruit

was tainted, you kept going, regardless; a momentum
that nagged me like a twitch or a recurrent dream. I had ricocheted

from a dead-end job in Boston to marriage in this small
upstate town, a marriage I did not believe in, to a man who hoped

I’d save him—God, we were all clueless about loving,
about living; searching for truth while we turned away.

Eve Letter: Detail with Serpent

—After a detail in Giuliano di Simone Ricci’s Madonna and Child Enthroned (c.1390)

Dear Looks-at-Herself,

The room is serene with angels.

You wrap yourself
in the gray blanket,
look up to see     hovering
three feet above the floor

a girl-face,
a copy of your own—

but on a snake body.

Erect torso of scales.
Her look, cold as spear-point,

passing from her to you
to generate a blaze of light,
is clearer than you see yourself.

Last night, a barred owl passed the window.
Nothing but cold wind came in—

Cold wind and                  owl sound.
A sense of lost.

There are days when you don’t know

if you are snake,
or naked Eve,
or Madonna.

Days when the question
is the only thing worth saying.

The Lost Keys

They say we have left the garden—
gates bolted shut. Each morning,

I greet my body—my friend, my dwelling place
in exile. She responds like a steadfast dog

who has grown old with me. Together
we listen as a flicker drums the woods awake.

The deer invade the yard and we don’t
give chase. Bemused, I look into her eyes

and ask, Who are you? I am here,
she replies. I am not for knowing—

The loss cannot be reimagined
even by someone who knows what was lost.

We have each other. Together, we sweep
and wash the floor, gather the mail.

At the market, we buy pink carnations
for the woman on 64th Street who found

my office keys and called to let me know.
It’s past five o’clock, and the woman waits

in the lobby. My body stumbles
to offer the flowers. The woman’s sweater—

brilliant pink. That random contact—
a brief Eden, with carnations.

To Eve, from the Woodland Bed

You sit here, absorbing what the eye takes in—
the probity of tulip trees, their open palms;

the moods of green—pleated, fringed—
and gestures—glaucous and smooth. You muse:

do limbs learn by reaching for the sun,
or does knowing reside in the seed, in the flair

to realize form? What does your own arm,
when it responds to the warmth of air—

ninety-two degrees today—understand—
or your ear, hearing the vireo’s incessant call.

It’s too much, all these timbres and tonalities
pressing on, marking and arousing you—

what can you discern? Do you attend
with your belly or skin? Do you warble or lilt?

Eve Letter: Home Economics

—After Alison Weld’s Birthright

Dear Covered-Up,

The question of identity invades

this painting, a diptych
like yourself.
Right panel—purple
snail-tracks
repeat on cotton broadcloth.
the gift of order,
or a trap—
the glistening a snail bestows on leaves—
coverings sewn by yourself.

The left, a wilderness in mauve—

a few red flames, wry undergrowth
of mud and milk.

Brushstrokes calculate
the sentience of texture.

That riot
beneath the skin—

stirring,
stirring.