Genesis

(~1991–1992, Boston)

It’s about how they’re walking
together down a dirt road,
almost touching, a woman
and a man, not speaking,
it’s about the desire telegraphing

from one body to another, the unraveling,
the beautiful stain of silence. Let
me show you this light
falling like a balm, a pungent oil,
into the trees. You want to go back

to what you were and the dream
winding loose like a rusted
wire, to that thin hour
of deerflies and uncertain water
the seedpods and blossoms drifting

like drunken moths, all around,
the wind dragging its loose fingers
across the prairie like a nervous
hand sifting through your hair.
You want to feel one more time

how it was to sit at her table,
the fossils and the bowl of roses
beside you in the growing dark,
the smell of fermented apples
drifting through the garden window,

then (later) your ear against her chest,
listening for saltwater sashaying
its way over sand
and into the deep. Looking down
through the trees and into the pale

amber glow, here, where it begins,
here in the garden, you see them
from above, the woman, the man,
leaning into the arms
of a peach tree: they are talking.

It is as if no word had ever been spoken
before now, as if they had just found
tongues. A long silence has been broken.
That first word, compassion,
which you both learned, which explained

everything, which anchored you in your dual orbits,
enthralled, made you giddy
with the desire of naming. Bird. Hand.
Metaphysics. Electron. She called water
a name you couldn’t understand

because you had your own word
for it. In the dark silence
of the garden night, yes,
here among the cicadas
each whisper was the hard seed

of a language roughly shaped,
wondrous and dangerous. The time has come
now to speak of things, to say
what you mean. Do you remember
taking the books down

from her shelf, one by one,
reading in the late August dark,
the heat spreading like a stain?
And what she said after:
We should never have left.

It is too late, even now.
Deep in the city you came to
after the first years, the scent
of rain lifted from the cobblestones,
the smell of pollen surfacing

like a buried animal
into the thick of your lives,
and you couldn’t name it. The sun
lay like a hand on your backs.
You couldn’t describe it.

There are moths who return wearily
always to the same light, every night,
because there is nothing else. There’s
a language in the way two bodies
fit precisely against each other,

arms languid in sleep, now
a litany of what you are…
do you remember

what the light was like, then,
in the last row of olives,
at the edge of the garden

you first knew, before everything after,
before you each crossed: all that water
moving into the dark,

washing the scent of eden,
crossing into another country?

Colleen Keefe