Hacked from My Flesh

I told you I'm a sucker for Garden of Eden poems. If anything, this one is even harsher and less forgiving than the last one....

The Creation of Eve

Bruce Beasley

We lay a long time in the brine of my blood,


Father,
this other
hacked from my flesh,


her side by my gashed side.
Strangers—


How fitfully we slept like that, her hair
sponging the long cut
just under my throat.


We didn’t speak, falling asleep, waking each other in starts—


both feverish.  Once I dreamed
You were calling and calling and I
couldn’t answer,
something caught deep on my tongue.


It was days
before we could eat; I split
a lopsided fruit and squeezed
the juice from its hundred
scarlet seeds
into her mouth—


That’s all she could take. So weak,
after being
crushed into life in Your hands . . .


I never asked
for another, didn’t know
what to say to her, what to do—


the first three days we just
gazed, not talking,
over the east side of the hill
where you can see all four of the rivers slipping
away from the garden (where
do they go?)—I laid
my head in her lap and she
hummed, and the sun
poured itself into the slow-moving water.
We watched
three horned birds
I’d never named
spiral above us,
black-winged and beaked, red-eyed—


Her skin 
and mine both stained, and our hair—
like the sky, a red we’d never seen,
and the birds
splayed their wings and tilted
above us in rings, circling
down to the bloody
mulch of fig leaves where we


kneeled . . .


My Father,
I never thought
either of us
would heal—




And there is a lot of craft that went into this one. The slant rhymes are not at all obvious or forced ("Father,/ this other"). There's all kinds of alliteration ("brine of my blood"). The rhythms are uneven but natural and very speakable - a clear sign of a good writer. And the narrative breaks my heart and blows my mind simultaneously. 


This is not prose with funny spacing. Nor is it easy parable or mythopoetic reinterpretation. The biblical narrative got sublimated into something else, something very big but very dark. There are echoes of every marriage, every relationship, codependency, depression and mental illness.


I don't know if Beasley is religious or ex-religious. (Neither would surprise me.) But this is the kind of writing Christians ought to be making: tough, thorny and unafraid. I love being both inspired and unsettled.