The Imperfect Paradise

1. SEASONAL

Which season is the loveliest of all?

Without a pause you smile and answer spring,

Thinking of Eden long before the fall.

I see green shrouds enclosing everything

And choose instead the chaos of the snow

Before God separated dark from light.

I hear the particles of matter blow

Through wintry landscapes on a wintry night.

You find the world a warm and charming place,

My Adam, you name everything in sight.

I find a garden of conspicuous waste-

The apple's flesh is cold and hard and white.

Still, at your touch my house warms to the eaves

As autumn torches all the fragile leaves.

2. IN THE GARDEN

How do we tell the flowers from the weeds

Now that the old equality of space

Has ended in the garden, and the seeds

Of milkweed and daisy scatter in disgrace?

Is it the stamen, petal, or the leaf

That like the ancient signature of Cain

Marks the flesh of wildflowers, to their grief

Just as the orchid blossoms into fame?

And Esau was the wildflower of his clan,

And Jacob was the brother who was chosen.

So we learn to distinguish man from man

Like botanists, our categories frozen.

But in a single morning roses die

While dandelions and chokeweed multiply.

3. DEEP IN THESE WOODS

Darling, how do you make your garden grow

Deep in these woods, drowning in so much shade

That even hardy may apples are slow

To rise above the shadows where they wade?

Are you a threat to every living tree?

We lean against two trunks, resting our backs

But though your craggy face is what I see

I know that somewhere you conceal an axe.

When he planned Eden did great God conceive

Flowers that flourish with no need of light?

And was there nothing Adam hid from Eve?

And doesn't the cereus bloom at night?

You place a burst of lilac in my hand

And sacrifice an oak. I almost understand.

4. THIEF

You caught a thieving squirrel in your trap

And for the sake of cardinal and jay

You put it, fat with birdseed, in a sack

And carried it a full five miles away.

Today there is another squirrel there

Or else, more likely, this one is the same,

Making its way through all the clues of air

Along the highway 'til it found our name.

Is this a metaphor for what we feel,

Pushing our nibbling doubts five miles from sight?

Boredom and passion, alternately real,

Pull us apart, then stagger us with light.

The animals of marriage are as wild,

hungry, and stubborn as any squirrel's child.

5. THE IMPERFECT PARADISE

If God had stopped work after the fifth day

With Eden full of vegetables and fruits,

If oak and lilac held exclusive sway

Over a kingdom made of stems and roots,

If landscape were the genius of creation

And neither man nor serpent played a role

And God must look to wind for lamentation

And not to picture postcards of the soul,

Would he have rested on his bank of cloud

With nothing in the universe to lose,

Or would he hunger for a human crowd?

Which would a wise and just creator choose:

The green hosannas of a budding leaf

Or the strict contract between love and grief?

6. SOMEWHERE IN THE EUPHRATES

Somewhere in the Euphrates, buried, lost,

The rusted gates of Eden still remain,

And archeologists at awful cost

Search for a snakeskin or an apple stain,

Talk of Atlantis and the walls of Troy

As if they had to prove each legend real

Or else, like fools of science, must destroy

Geographies of what we only feel.

While sometimes watching at the window here

I see you in the garden on your knees;

It is as close as you have come to prayer,

Planting the shadblow and the peonies,

Making azalias, hollies, dogwoods grow,

Digging up Eden with a single hoe.