Trees of Knowledge

Tobin 17 Daniel Tobin Trees of Knowledge (photograph of a dismembered Salvadoran rebel. Carpenter Center, 1982) Always in pictures of the myth, those two stand under it, mannequins about to come to consciousness, the sexes hidden behind comical pods. In Durer's version, for example, the woman offers the bitten fruit to the man who reaches for it, without thought, like someone who knows he's already condemned; while up the trunk the serpent coils between them, with eyes of a public servant seeking higher appointment. So it was even in my Children's Bible: hate given shape under a puffy canopy of leaves, the other tree nowhere in sight. How different from this photo: limbs cut off, the crowning fruit severed to hang, a threat, in the town square; and where the sun fills the bay's calm below the scorched edge of a hill: the savage trunk rooted in ground, its bark bared to expose the spine. And no one anywhere who'll tell the story, but flies congregating on marrow, their children quickened already—pale, larval shrouds. ...