WEBVTT

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This next poem is inspired
by an illuminated manuscript.

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"The Story of Adam and Eve."

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Their spines must
have aged like hooks.

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Those brothers painting in cold
rooms, deep blue, and olive

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snaking down a tree.

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They must have beaten gold
leaf through each thumbnail.

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God pressed in
goatskin every hour.

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What do I know about
illuminating books.

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The bowl of saffron
turned to stone, who

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remembers kingfishers on water.

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Before the serpent, before
the beasts lay on their paws,

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before stones
released their heat,

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before the savage
machinery, a woman

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sprung from bone
facing her husband.

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His body inside her, his body
a wing in thickened amber.

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As in the riffling surface
of things revealed,

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as in the palm turned
to the word flensed

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from the body of God, as in
the first breath murmured

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in the man's lungs,
and how I understood

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when the city blacked out
and substations powered off.

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Sudden downpour at midday.

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Women in voile skirts
clinging like seaweed.

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In 15th century
Paris, the manuscript

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inked with quills
cut from a swan

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becomes a measure of the
will, but also of the vine.

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About the beginning, I
could tell you the garden

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bloomed multiple bells.

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I could say everything
I know about beauty

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I learned from the bodies ruin.

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The rib drawn through
his quartered skin.

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The skin sewn and the woman
born a dark homunculus.

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I could listen for the first
rasp like the hinge on a storm

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door and I would know the
beginning was the word,

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but also the soot, also the lie.

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Think of the parchmenter
scraping his curved blade.

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Cutting double leaves
soaked in lime.

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Think of the calligrapher,
gesso, lamp black, oak gall,

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mineral pigment,
the book revealing

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what bereft means, field
warmed with assault,

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crows echoing their
brothers, the songbirds.

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City of exiles given
to powdered iron.

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