Genesis

Carl Boon

Being from Eden, we believed the sea was something to be held, tamed. You turned your back to it and six golden terns gathered at your ankles. When you faced it, it stilled and gave you fowl and starfish. Those were the hours of no blemish, of being, and we ate mackerel roasted by a nameless angel on fire that couldn’t burn us. We slept on jewel-beds under satin and the stars, and the satin and the stars were one until I saw you flinch— a storm in you, a body. From before the first I feared it, you becoming needful and a man, you blending language to your skin, desiring pain.

menigedu yihi newi menigedu yihi newi

In the morning I offered you a plum, an earthworm, a strawberry, but only you could clutch my hip and wonder if the closed would open, if the bodies given us would last if there were puncture and a cry. In a distant place a horse’s hoof touched sod, a sapling snapped, a leaf descended, and then you came at me in anger, demanding the only thing I had no power to give. A thorn

35

inami ya mech’eresha neberi inami ya mech’eresha neberi

36 caused your wrist to bleed. A woman not Me broke bread on the plateau and made a song for us of human sounds. You strode away in silence, hurt, while I washed my body needlessly.