I
You know the story.
There was a garden and a tree.
God said not to touch it.
And She did.
II
We watched her sin in picture books,
Solemn, white little Eve with oversized teardrop eyes.
We colored her hair purple on recycled copy paper
And where it said The Fall
We filled in the A with rainbow stripes.
We heard it told in distant, rosy cautions,
Criss-cross-applesauce on the altar steps on Sunday.
We never had to ask why;
There was no dearth of teachers:
She wanted to be God, they said,
Knowing good from evil.
She had paradise, but
Still
she
wanted.
She wanted
to know.
Wicked thing.
It’s evil, I guess, to want to know evil when you see it.
So the end came, right there at the beginning,
In those juicy drops of Knowledge on her lips.
III
In childhood I listened to that story,
Its echoes growing
sharper every year,
While I knit a blanket
out of sins and serpents
And hung it up
Between God and me
And Me and me.
I stared at its pattern of yeses and nos
Until my eyes crossed.
IV
And I wondered.
What does it mean, To Know?
I wondered,
If she couldn’t tell good from bad,
how could she see a snake for a snake,
or a God for a good?
Why didn’t Adam wonder?
And if perfection’s so perfect,
Why is a fig so enticing?
V
See, I’m with Michelangelo on this;
As accustomed as I am to apples,
It will always be a fig for me,
Not a mandrake
a mushroom
a pomegranate
not even a persimmon,
though that’s close …
I mean, have you looked at them,
persimmons and figs?
Sisters, they have a certain familiarity about them.
I imagine naked Eve,
unmasked and uncovered,
looked up at the tree
and down at herself
And said,
Oh my God! Figs!
She, precious child of God, image bearer –
Saw a piece of her loved and sacred self
Dangling plump and fragrant from a bough,
And when her skin her hair her tongue by reflex all
responded,
Did a chiding voice in her imperfect memory cry out
Do not do evil, Woman?
There must be some mistake.
How am I evil?
Eve
Wanted
To know.
VI
I don’t need a snake to ask these questions.
I am my own serpent,
A wild disaster of wanting.
I
Want
To
Know.
God, I want to know
How to believe in you and me at once;
Why I never saw you in myself
When I could see you in a cricket on the steps;
I want to know why I still can’t tear that damned blanket down;
Why Love’s God would limit how and who I love
And why it seems to matter so much
that I’m made
Of persimmons and figs.
VII
I can’t help but think, God,
That you smile a bit at my defiance.
After all, you’re the one who decided to talk to us in
stories.
And that’s telling in itself
Because if you want to shackle someone
You
don’t use stories for chains.
Stories
are dangerous and unpredictable --
see, that's
my language.
I know
just as well as you do,
Stories
never really belong to you.
They
change.
If the fate of the world lies in obedience
Why not just say so?
But
instead of answers
You
gave us a garden
And a
woman
And a
fig.
VIII
A question hung from a tree.
Eve took it up and sunk her teeth in.
What a gloriously human thing to do.
And I wonder,
Years later,
When her feet were calloused and her belly stretched and
sore,
I wonder if she still grinned a little
When she remembered that taste,
If it still danced across her tongue.
I wonder if she realized:
It isn’t the knowing,
It’s the wanting
That makes us divine.
