Figs

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.