This next poem is inspired by an illuminated manuscript.
"The Story of Adam and Eve."
Their spines must have aged like hooks.
Those brothers painting in cold rooms, deep blue, and olive
snaking down a tree.
They must have beaten gold leaf through each thumbnail.
God pressed in goatskin every hour.
What do I know about illuminating books.
The bowl of saffron turned to stone, who
remembers kingfishers on water.
Before the serpent, before the beasts lay on their paws,
before stones released their heat,
before the savage machinery, a woman
sprung from bone facing her husband.
His body inside her, his body a wing in thickened amber.
As in the riffling surface of things revealed,
as in the palm turned to the word flensed
from the body of God, as in the first breath murmured
in the man's lungs, and how I understood
when the city blacked out and substations powered off.
Sudden downpour at midday.
Women in voile skirts clinging like seaweed.
In 15th century Paris, the manuscript
inked with quills cut from a swan
becomes a measure of the will, but also of the vine.
About the beginning, I could tell you the garden
bloomed multiple bells.
I could say everything I know about beauty
I learned from the bodies ruin.
The rib drawn through his quartered skin.
The skin sewn and the woman born a dark homunculus.
I could listen for the first rasp like the hinge on a storm
door and I would know the beginning was the word,
but also the soot, also the lie.
Think of the parchmenter scraping his curved blade.
Cutting double leaves soaked in lime.
Think of the calligrapher, gesso, lamp black, oak gall,
mineral pigment, the book revealing
what bereft means, field warmed with assault,
crows echoing their brothers, the songbirds.
City of exiles given to powdered iron.