First Genesis, as Told by Himself and Gardening, and: Irrigation

57 seth abramson FIRST GENESIS, AS TOLD BY HIMSELF AND GARDENING In the beginning where reason should storm were only recollection and some trees, multiplied by experience and flowering brush until, he supposed, the dropcloth of the endtimes. A nervy boy with none of the whimsy of thought, he thought at the end of all things all things were merely covered again— recovered— and lost. He had little to lose, his belief in joy without the sanctuary of neutral ground. So he thought, and she thought, and both of them might have thought so perpetually, reeling in their own inquisition, but the love of their god was briefer and darker than that, so eventually they were left with all the cloud of feeling no reason could darken. So he wept, she wept, and all that was wept not to be walked on longer and further— as all had grown to love their love for all. The ground beneath the ground between them all watched vines wheedling into new places, until one vine of many identical vines touched everything. There had never been anything so horrible, and so the vine spoke, not horribly, CRSUM09 poetry.indd 57 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM 58 of the life of a god, and of the ground a god is loved above, and of the dead the endtimes plough beneath, and how between those two is only thought and experience and always—(this ruined them)—both at once. CRSUM09 poetry.indd 58 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM 59 seth abramson IRRIGATION Sunset was pluming over the riverbank, and still metaphors could not be taken seriously. Also the piles of children two clicks from the bank could not be taken seriously— as in a figurative world that was not just unlikely, but impossible. Still it brought the realization that death is not just another form of wounding, just as a metaphor is never the object it is assigned to misrepresent. Weeks afterward, a man who saw it all will become unresponsive to audio and video, affected only by the imagined temporalities of rivers and beachheads and children and the way they pile, and of course that happened— because it suggests a response, and the only thing the times require of us is not to see or hear but a response. And if responding without audio or video should meet that ancient commandment of forgetting anything any clicks at all from the river of our experience, well, there’s justice in that, too— the complicit self for which no metaphor is possible CRSUM09 poetry.indd 59 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM 60 pluming over its better self, an image which cannot be taken seriously under pain of someone else’s death. CRSUM09 poetry.indd 60 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM ...