Conceived

 

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?