Since I mentioned Adam and Eve in the last poem,
I'll read another poem.
This poem is done with the Dada method
that I was talking about before.
It's called "Tender Acre."
As you slept, the pulse flickering on your neck
like a trick of light, I thought how earlier,
beside the sleeping shape, Adam labored that first night
to stay awake, afraid she'd vanish
in the morning with the moon.
Out of the Earth sprang the planet's blurred,
unpredictable life.
The pulse of the near hill--
or was it the shudder he was born with? --rocked him.
The animals also, who yesterday brushed like wind
against his body, were now given form.
On a branch beneath a sheer canopy of leaves,
a yard-long icicle began to melt. It hung,
glistening and patient, while a zipper of vertebrae
inched all the way down its back.
Then, bands of bargello stitched the skin.
Tiny sawtooth flames of dull gold and rust, rust and gold.
This he named snake.
On the topmost branch of the tree,
a bird bristled with little white thorns.
Then, each thorn fanned out like a palm frond,
and the bird flew away.
All day Adam watched and listened,
but he couldn't name his loneliness.
The long oh of sorrow, the ooh of hallelujah.
11 curved knife blades of his rib cage,
and the 12th that cut his flesh without injury
he accepted, as he accepts these other gifts placed before him.
All night Adam watched and listened
and memorized her human shape so that later, were she not there,
his memory could reconstruct that absent body from the air
and wrench him from his solitude before the tender acre
cradles her.
Those poems are a lot denser than the ones
that I start off with an idea.
One thing that happened with them,
I started writing in a much longer line,
much more complicated, and they're harder to read too.