Golden Shovel after James Baldwin's letter to Cynthia Packard, July 4, 1987
“The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.”
– Genesis 3:20

I. Fall

Eve heralds the year of the cherubim. Everything
she says swivels in the hollow above her double-crossing tongue, seems
like trouble, like agony, to know. Thigh’s slash, crotch’s slit, the very
urges that extend Adam’s dust into palpable progeny. Strange,
isn’t it? To flail in ferns, chew doomed pomes, the snake and
woman who stuck out their legs in man’s path, his tentative
feet red, bled—inevitable callus not yet out the
bone from which all tough things rise. Moss asleep in soil, the greener way,
a stolid, personable verdance, like a persistent bruise. The year of
our ripped arms, ribs, all years one, all skin rests on its generants’ death, time
guarantees none but scar. Silk of once-gilt blood, of guilt, of knowing what is
Eve; humankind. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, men are no different.

II. Snake

A child like me, pin Eve and her multitudes to a butterfly box? It
can’t be moral. The fluffy-tiled wing, dulled, shadowed. Hollow thorax goes
bone dry in a week. Maybe these Darwinian crucifixions will fast-
en us descendents to the sin-savior, but kinesthesis only goes so far, much
to specimens’ dismay. The snake suckles man’s pinkie and pest, more
out of debt than thirst. Rattle, corn, pine, Sinaloan milk, they slowly
digest rat after rat, whose liquefied skulls bump every vertebrae. It
rings out like a xylophone, this song of swallow, and our memory is
yanked to the apple again, its tuneful slither down Eve’s esophagus, gone,
gone, pudding-smooth in her vat of abdominal acid. Suddenly,
all I know becomes scar of soul. The butterflies’ wings, though softer, are of the
same scales as the torn snakeshed in my drawer, which I’ll give my children one day.

III. Wings

Butterflies, the bloodless birds, are angelicker than the highest-leaping man, which
would shock the greedy, should they learn the scripture. Wind had
dumped me, sticky, sun-blanched, on many mountains before it seemed
like I got it through my thick, Eve-born skull that I was a sinner. So
I gave up on salvation, settled for prayer and candles, every slow,
self-absorbed Thank you! burning like the sword and
the cherubim—a thousand-feathered garrison, for man pushes heavy
toward the trees. Barrier of sinewed down and barnyard beast and
holiest, most nauseatingly blessed wings, a prayer for the river, then
for the forest, not its fruits but its shade. Here and there
black flecked cabbage butterflies, white-tailed deer—the catch is
the ticks. They suckle at man’s crotch and kill, but
that is how it should be: a red circle shifts over swelling skin, the
man, in death, grows wings, breaks fever; his emptied bones clatter beyond night.