• 

So. Here we are then. Just us. Just us two.
 I see from The Writings that you came first:
me second, made with a rib ripped from you.
Is that the way it is to be? Cast
forever in the backwash of your sex?

The Writings are such patriarchal tripe.
explanations come from genetics
which give women conceptive bragging rights.
The egg came first, was followed by the worm,
and, for goodness sake, it is the female
of our kind in whom our children grow. They nurse
our milky infant kin. Man’s wriggling sperm
is swallowed up. We are incidental.
Whatev. What’s hers is his and his is hers?

Hmmm. It’s good to be held. Hmmm. Your skin
is soft. Hmmm. I feel safe in your arms.
Hmmm. My love . . .my hope . . . Where do we begin?
We’ll know. Instinct will kick in. Feel my palms
cup your shoulder blades. Feel my upturned hands
placed here upon your breasts. Adam, your lips.
My lips. Eve? Allow yourself. Understand
that this is what it is. There is no script.

Skin. Soft skin. At the faintest touch, or brush,
I’m taken to a rising springful place.
My eyelids fall, involuntarily
and as they do my arms and hands adjust.
Feather fingertips leave shiver traces
and silver stars spill down behind my knees.
Eve, Eve, this has never happened before.
I do not know where we are, let alone
where we are going. What is all this for?
Adam, Adam, we’re in it now, we’ve thrown
our stone; we’re jumping in, surrendering.
Adam, husshh. This passion is a tide
we cannot turn. We must give in. Rushing
waters pull us just one way. Besides
I can’t imagine it’ll be that hard.
I have to disagree. Ha! My mistake.
Hmmm. I feel, no mistake. It’s pure pleasure.
It feels good. Is it all for me?  It’s ours,
to do with as we wish. To give? To take?
To touch? To feel. Accept? Firmly and far.

Dressed neither in the turned-earth things we’ve said
nor in the future’s hearth-black silhouettes
let’s speak and hear in jumbled blues and reds
met here among the hyssop violets.
Adam, Adam! Let’s dance in purple blurs,
viridian, red, fawn and cobalt blue.
Let’s swim in tangerine and lavender
butter creams, barley, hops and honey dew.
Wrap us in a summertime of being
imbued with primrose-jasmine spells. Hold
us to your gleaming-scarlet stem, heaving
and breathing breaths of rose-quartz crimson gold.
Adam, Adam, let me to Kingdom come.
Oh you. Oh you. Oh you. And I. Are one.

I love you, Adam, man. You are my home.
I love you, Eve, and love this loving hour.
Together, we are finished; we are whole.
We have grown, come of age¸ flowered.
Eve – you shine like morning Sun on water;
you have the beauty of a cloudless sky.
We share this emptied moment afterwards,
a touching, thrilling a single source of life.
My darling one, your breaths are softer now.
As are yours, my sweetness. I love you, Eve,
and love this precious time drawn close and calm,
time spent in the lea of our desires
It’s time I wish would last eternity
a timeless time of blissful certainty.

(for two voices, set before the Fall, from a very long poem I am writing called ‘body+blood’. Posted here for Emma on our 23rd wedding anniversary)