Rubens wonders
how to put that ripple of unrest
in Paradise where it doesn’t belong.
It can’t be there — or how then,
for won’t then
Heaven, too, be spoiled?
He sleeps and dreams Eve,
who comes wanting not knowing —
and in an arc the dream falls
from the snake to the woman to the man.
For Jim and Nancy Forest
When my grandma put up her fence
it wasn’t because of the neighbors.
It was because of the junk.
They’d never done anything and
she’d never done anything.
But she didn’t have to look at it.
They’d all have to look at the fence, though.
And at, behind it, the open heart of man —
at Adam atop his heart cleaving.
Guard the secret
star you stole.
Hide it dark
within your eye.
Wait for dawn,
smoke will teach
you how to tell
the lovely lie.
Many a reasoning unreasoning sow.
He himself is heir to the jackass,
to his regret.
The barnyard reeks of natural
and unnatural failings we’d call sin
were that word, too, not joined
to the general disrepair.
Moaning while pruning,
I find you
little man
slinking away from a fruit
you shouldn’t have eaten
in a season
it shouldn’t have known.
The fruit is the fruit
of God’s jumbo garden;
the season’s the season
of wisdom undone.
I’ve hardly brought it up.
Though I wonder,
when I hear
the thud and thump,
if the flitting nut falling
isn’t some dodgy gift
heaped atop
an untimely demotion
Utrecht Journal 