Richibi’s Weblog

“Adam and Eve“ (1596)

Lucas Cranach the Elder

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from The New Yorker, January 27, 2014

“Adam and Eve” by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1526

She seems a mere girl really,
small-breasted and slim,
her body luminescent
next to Adam, who scratches
his head in mild perplexity,
So many baubles hang
from the tree
it didn’t hurt to pick one.
The snake is a quicksilver curve
on a branch she is almost
young enough to swing from.

The garden bores her anyway:
no weedy chaos among
the flowers and vegetables;
the animals so tame
you can hardly tell the lamb
from the lion, the doe from the stag
whose antlers outline Adam’s modesty.
She is like that teen-age girl
who wandered from the mall last week
not to be seen again, the world before her
glittering and perilous.

Linda Pastan

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yesterday on a mission to buy socks,
finally – I had only a pair left and one
of those with a hole in it – I wondered
about clothes, why hadn’t we evolved
fur or feathers or, heaven forbid,
scales, like all other creatures,
without exception

cherry trees were in blossom, birds
sang along my path, despite an
inoffensive drizzle as I went along

perhaps, I thought, by standing erect
our private parts were too much in
evidence for even indiscriminate
Nature to bear, though apes in all
their varieties walk on two legs and
seem to cavort happily, indeed
lasciviously, though ever
unsheathed, I objected, everywhere

the only difference I could muster
between us and them was that we’d
eaten from the Tree of Knowledge,
the fruit, apparently, of our
apocalyptic decadence, while they’d
never had ever an Eve, nor, for that
matter, an, equally complicit, note,
Adam, no matter what the, mostly
male, elders might say

therefore apes gambol in their
Garden of Eden still, as you can
see in the Cranach above, serenely
uncontrite, while we buy socks in
the jungle next door, and berate,
burdened, our bedevilled lubricities,
what’s under those strategically
positioned, and obliterating, leaves

Tree of Knowledge indeed

Richard