The Laughter of Adam and Eve

New Covenant, Causality

5 New Covenant, Causality In the beginning now no longer, what happens happens for reasons, leaving spoor behind as if a wounded beast had crashed through brush. Sometimes the trail is as hard to follow as when the hundred-year oak felled by a windstorm lay in the sun for days, the uprooted end a pried-up cache of antler and tusk, and in the midst thereof, strings, too, tethering into the pit where the farmer’s girl and boy played until the tremble into motion, swinging shut the lid to the gouged earth as the tree righted, killing the children. The inquiry then desperate, so as not to blame the father alone who harvested some of the splayed limbs, and a section also of counterweighing crown so that, dismembered and topped, the trunk’s repose was flexion, bowed or arched-back struggle to stand on what still branched underground. Blame, though, must be apportioned, objects accused, the usual laws of nature brought to account, but after the death of innocence by the garden tree from which knowledge hung, and in the cool of days since, when the motive of everything disguises itself in blankness, call it again a species of wind, even if there were none, the smallest breath of ever-moving air over the face of the water, the principal light burning by day down, evaporation tautening then the most tendrilous roots until the old tree rose up in the presence. ...