Lines, Post-Lapsarian

Published in the Asheville Poetry Review

In the din of your mushroom parlance

I carved a crimson apple.

At leisure, on knife-point,

I peeled it with my teeth:

fresh severance between glossy skin

and the pale, unglobed fruit.

You called me Eve.

All evening you cried,

your black eyes seizing advantage:

you cannot, ordinarily, weep.

You could be the sort of man

to rape a man’s daughters as he watches

and kill a man’s daughters as he watches

and return from the pillage

to tell me it was good.

I take down my favorite plate.

I hold the wooden handle of a sharpened knife.

You pleaded for mythic proportions,

before the fall,

before the line of have and have not

that demarcates your days.

You want to be twelve, turn the corner,

find me smiling under a tree.

You want, at thirty, to bring poems like flowers.

You, sad man, compose a thousand pretties

that disappear on my doorstep.

You want, simply, to sit in a chair

as I take you in my mouth,

as I rear back mad with laughter

and smear across your lips.

You want a stable of straw,

crude impressions of dress

you can tear from my bones

when you take me.

You want, in a pleat of wonder,

for me to shove back onto you:

palm gripping a knife-handle.

You want, above all, my protection.

I stand, proverbial snake,

both jaws braced in simple fruit.

When I give you my plate,

reveal the glass cracked,

you will think it a metaphor for me.

As if I, too, am a fault line

and you, receiving,

should preserve the shatter’s imminence.

You, searching Eve

between covered and bare,

sterile dress and frothy knife,

stable and long cool stairs.

On red edge I rustle,

I speak in seeded blueprint:

Take, eat, breathe.