Music composed and performed by Risa Peris
Like a beast from worn, ancient hills
and hidden caves riddled with crevice worms
Eve was starved, wild – a thing so similar to the
thundering lizards roaming sweltered plains
She was collapsing, inward, cheeks fallen in
and separated bones poking thin skin
She had Adam’s magic rib so graciously
given to her so she could have life – breath, form
In her knotted hair crinkled, cracking leave corpses
cluttered reminding of winter future
Final death of universal autumn running to
time’s end where winter guts all, the bitter mass
Adam preferred the high weeds, cracking neck bones
of deep roaming mammals, flinging flints
He paid no attention to Eve withered from minus attention,
her organs drying in curdled blood
She had his rib but he did not notice the vacancy,
the hole blasted with God’s dynamite touch
Near a tree Eve’s gluey tears stuck to pale,
yellow dried grasses for Eden was wasting in drought
The serpent was disturbed,
upset in a mirror and only wanted the immediacy of misery to die
Eve gazed to the white sky for the sun
was new and balmy glowing hues had yet to refine
The serpent chucked a book
through the nearly juiceless air from the tall, blooming tree
It hit Eve on the neck and fell open,
alien marks from an alien beast, she could not read
The serpent chucked a perfected fruit
through the shriveled air from the eternal, flowering tree
Eve, ravished with hunger and raving in mind,
bit the flesh candied and luscious, velvet soft
Knowledge trickles slow, drop, drop,
beading like sweat on fine fevered skin in summer heights
Her sinews plumped, her cheeks expanded and fattened,
her hips a maddening curve of song
Eve knew all, her purpose and her strength,
and she went to the savannah to find oblivious Adam
She found him crouching by a beast with bristled hair
and in his hand was a sharpened stick
Adam was callow, a He-child ready to kill the life,
the animal he thought was given to him
God said dominion and Adam knotted rope
and tethered all his gifts, interpreted subjugation
Eve handed the saccharine bitten core to Adam to eat,
let the infinite light flood his nucleus
Adam was suspicious of Eve and her bizarre outline,
without him she would have no life
She looked at him, feral and now soft,
filled out and flooded with some heat he didn’t know
He was hungry so he consumed and
took in all that nutritious fruit, the only thing forbidden
And when the knowledge came to him,
not slow but a torrent, a waterfall in the hidden soul
He sat down the weapon and fell upon Eve, now familiar,
no longer a child, and with his rib
Eve allowed him in, a hot smile and something more
humanly primitive than the riches of Eden
There were no terrifying angels,
fluttering wings or mountains to scale for the precipice plunge
There was green, varied, articulated, lustrous,
dark and light, a billion hues as Adam moved
It rained in Eden but the water was home
and it flooded the thirsty and graced the soil
The animals shivered, the serpent wetted and slick,
and even God wept for Adam and Eve
For the love growing in the leafy,
pliable kernel – the verdant abyss rising up in Eve
Crescendo thunder, blinding silver lightning,
magma swelling beneath the rigid land
Eve screamed in the illumination and Adam quivered
in the realization, sudden weighty love
She said to breathless Adam,
“You gave me absorbing life, splash of seed, a dear libation.”
She said to sleepy Adam,
“Thank you for the rib and the green sapling shooting in my soul.”
And Eve slept under a bower of crystal smeared stars
and winked at the expanding time
THE END