This next poem is called, "The First Woman".
And it's a terza rima.
I teach myself forms, because I don't believe in MFA programs.
I'm sorry about that view.
And so, I do it on my own.
And so I decided that I was going to teach myself forms.
And one of them, because I like the name, was a terza rima.
I just thought it'd be nice to say
I have written a terza rima.
But also another thing was because I
had read one of those books about women
confronting the spiritual whatever the hell it was.
And there was--
It's-- when I'm coming in on a positive moment, you know,
if ever I say, "whatever the hell it was,"
it just means that my brain's not firing anymore.
You just have to forgive me.
But it was-- in it there was a little piece
by Ursula Le Guin, where Eve gets to unname everything.
Like Adam names everything, and then Eve
get to unname everything.
It is really beautiful.
You really-- Catch me later, I might
remember the name of the book.
And it's really a fabulous piece and so I thought, "Oh,
I have an Eve story."
And then I thought what form do I want to cast it in.
So I decided that I wanted the terza rima,
because basically it was a menage a trois between me
and Adam and Eve.
So I like tercets for that reason.
And the other thing, this is going
to horrify Marilyn, the formalist in her,
because I'm sure that terza rima was not intended in this way.
But I like the way that the rhymes are like little valises
or suitcases, where you open them up,
and then you take the middle rhyme,
and then you place it beside it and you open it up again.
And since this is a journey I thought,
what better form than to have like a series
of little suitcases, unpacking the information in the poem.
And then also that it ends with a couplet.
I mean traditionally you don't have to have the couplet.
But usually any number of tercets that you'd like,
and then it ends with a couplet.
I thought, "Perfect, a bunch of little
suitcases that you lift--
open."
You know how it goes with the A-B-A. So you pick that B.
And you lift it up and you put it beside that.
And then you open that up, and then C emerges in the middle.
And you open up that C. And you open that up,
and then D emerges in the middle.
So it felt like continually-- these, kind of like-- almost
like Russian boxes or something.
And so the two lines at the end, the couplet,
felt to me like the feet landing at the end of the journey.
So--
This is what happens when you're self-taught.
You find all these weird ways to associate with the structural--
"The First Woman".
"She was my Sunday school teacher
when I was just seven and eight.
He was the newly hired pastor, an albino,
alarming sight with his transparent eyelashes
and mouse-pink skin that looked like it might hurt
whenever she caressed his arm.
Since Eva was her name, to my child's mind
it made great sense that she should fall in love with him.
He was Adán.
Before the Fall and afterward, her invert twin.
And she, Eva, was blonde as well, though more robust,
like Liv Ullmann.
I loved her honey hair, her full lips,
her green eyes a nameless sin.
Not that I worried all that much--
the church was Presbyterian.
In Sunday school, her way to teach us kids to pray
was to comment on all the beauty we could touch or see
in our environment.
My hand was always in the air to volunteer my sentiment.
Since other kids considered prayer a chore,
the floor was usually mine.
My list of joys left out her hair
but blessed the red hibiscus seen through the windows
while others bowed their heads.
Her heart I schemed to win with purple prose
on meringue clouds.
For who was Adán, anyway, I thought,
but nada spelled backward?
While hers, reversed, called out, 'Ave!
Ave!' The lyric of a bird born and airborne on the same day.
But it was night when I saw her outside the church
for the last time--
yellow light, mosquitoes, summer.
I shaped a barking dog, a fine but disembodied pair
of wings with my hands.
She spoke in hushed tones with my parents.
The next day I would find myself up north, in a strange house,
without my tongue and almost blind,
there was so much to see.
This caused Cuba, my past, to be eclipsed in time,
but Eva stayed, a loss.
'Ave,' I learned, meant also this--
'Farewell!' I haven't seen her since."