This poem takes as its title a verse from the Bible,
"I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land,"
and has an epigraph from Emily Dickinson,
"life's spell is so exquisite, everything
conspires to break it."
And Eve is speaking, in this.
"It wasn't bliss.
What was bliss but the ordinary life?
She'd spend hours in patter, moving through whole days
touching, sniffing, tasting--
exquisite housekeeping in a charmed world.
And yet there was always more of the same, all that happiness,
the aimless Being There.
So she wandered for a while, bush to arbor,
lingered to look through a pond's restive mirror.
He was off cataloging the universe, probably,
pretending he could organize what was clearly
someone else's chaos.
That's when she found the key--
that's when she found the tree, the dark crabbed branches
bearing up such speechless bounty,
she knew without being told this was forbidden.
It wasn't a question of ownership--
who could lay claim to such maddening perfection?
And there was no voice in her head, no whispered intelligence
lurking in the leaves--
just an ache that grew until she knew she'd
already lost everything except desire, the red heft of it
warming her outstretched palm."