Conceived
in Paradise
Born
in Perdition
In
paradise I poised my foot above the boat and said:
Who
prayed for me?
James Wright
Father
Following
the inoculation I turned
a
12x24 swatch of mostly grass sod
by
hand and hoe and rake,
weighting the arriving rain.
Soft
sifts of humus, small pockets
of
sand after the gas tiller quit so
then
the blade end of the garden hoe
rose
and fell in old-time before-
plow
sweat that chilled me
when
I sat down three or four
hours
later. I thought I’d never be
able
to hoe like that by hand
if
my life came down to it
and
thought how habitually a good
Catholic
considers Adam’s first son
plunging
his bone hoe or stone
hoe
into the earth God gave
to
him and he opened it and felt it
sift
though while he rubbed it
with
his thumb and tasted it
with
his tongue. He was conceived
in
Paradise, that Cain. I read it
in a
Midrashim once and thought
it
must have some consequence, some
thing
in his flesh beneath his impatient
scars, something in his flesh
and
beneath those edges that ached.
Cain. Poor Cain. Raising lesions
and
his own blood and coaxing his world
to
bend to him the way maybe Able
bent
to the stone when his ewe
was
hard delivering how he’d coax
the
womb in letting go and though
that
stone was cast perhaps from
Cain’s
acre yet another parcel
for
harvest moons and moons
into
God’s own length of days,
so
you’d have to know when Cain
blistered
and bled into his dirt
he
was bleeding bliss from his tissues
and
suffering it into the clods
and
turned over sods and eruption
of
rocks rocks rocks. It makes me
want
to say: Imagine Able, lazy,
gazing
as his sheeps, their babies
graze
on Cain’s green grass
turning
it somehow miraculous
into
black and white gravity.
Bound
land clouds. It makes me
want
to ask you to imagine that
maybe
Able’s lazy gazing as the sheep
graze
is taking his time to poke Cain’s
laboring,
(maybe we have some
of
the story wrong or simply
misunderstood
or too just listen
to
the side we’re given) and that pro-
verbial
you missed a spot and only
Cain
may know, corporal and alone
the
hiss insisting beneath his
skin
and lifting up a liquid
sizzle
within his rhythm—we’re
taught
to hate Cain—maybe
as
much as he was said to have
hated
Able, the favorite of God’s
offspring’s
offspring. Consider
maybe
the stone was already chosen.
Consider
the loosed handle and hoe
already
thrown over. Bow to
every
muscle then brush the dust
and
afterwards weigh what remains
and
say you agree with me that the taking
is
silent as the raising when it’s lifted
into
the air free of hand and land
to
arc to its companions.
There’s
that fleeting weightlessness
of the freedom solid things can never
possess. God probably walked
that
newest garden Cain made
and
tested the rock for all its flaws
and
tossed and tossed and tossed
until
this this is the one and left it
lonely
as himself on the cairn
that
will come to mark and cover
the
crime that’s making its way even
now past
the trees past the heat and strain
of
rain. And who after all
of
this will be well entirely? Won’t we
all
be the real banished ones
both
those above the earth and those
below
it all on their own and turning
first above and then below, to stone?
