The Zones of Paradise

VERSES FOR THE MADONNA OF HUMILITY WITH THE TEMPTATION OF EVE

VERSES FORTHE MADONNA OF HUMILITY WITHTHETEMPTATION OF EVE Carlo da Camerino ca. , tempera and gold on wood  This museum will be my refuge, this painting, my chapel— an easy mile away from Intensive Care. The lighting’s low, and the window’s shaded in with January graphite. But the eye, like the heart, knows how to accommodate the dark.  Eve’s lying at eye level, propped up on an elbow. And never has abyss been so good to pink, the void a perfect foil for her foreground flesh. She fits into the black like a woman ready to be skewered in a vaudeville act. You can tell the painter loves her, the way he’s touched her every place he can with paint. And he’s noticed what she’s thinking: holding the pear, as Hamlet did the skull, while gazing up at someone who’s got everything to lose. Eve’s about to make the choice Mary has to live with. Yet her waves of golden hair suggest she’s thinking of Rapunzel, too, and ten thousand times ten thousand other happy and savage endings.   What’s missing from this picture? Adam. Though he’s implied in Eve’s attentive nipples, in her open-minded stance. The serpent’s wound his body up a barren stake; he’s a scrawny vine blooming to a small, bald human head— more phallic than a penis, more freakish than a porn star’s prick. And he flatters himself, taking credit. He doesn’t notice how her pink outmeasures his, how, for half-a-dozen hundred years, she hasn’t graced him with a second glance.  Strangers in the waiting room, but we all pray to the same phone propped up on a vacant wall, petulant idol in a shrine of sudden answers. And now the shrill summons comes for me: at the end of the line, a nurse saying, So far, so good— my husband’s skull cracked open and the doctor’s hand descending into wet satchels of memory, solved algebras of love, the deep bituminous lusts and fears.  Mary’s throne thunders up from Eve’s black cornerstone,  her middle-aged flesh a far cry from the strawberries and cream of creation. She’s done the best she can with what she has— a gilt and azure dress large enough to flatter— but her bare breast seems shaped from marzipan and affixed to her clavicle. And her skin is tainted green, though it’s too early for premonitions of Chagall, or the mossy afterlife. True, that headdress would give you one hell of a headache, each quill of the gaudy, gargantuan crown topped off by a cameo: the semiprecious faces of Matthew, Mark, Judas, John.l.l.l. They’re up high, in the glare of a little spotlight. But I can see how much they weigh on Mary’s mind.  My husband sleeps on in the sterile light, a seismograph scribbling out the quakeline of his shaken heart, and bands of bloody gauze comforting the fault. But here the baby turns his perfect head to look each time I walk into the room. It’s hard to nurse a baby of that age— the little tug-of-war between the eye and tongue. And did he also watch the painter’s nodding brush, and the women slipping shyly in to kiss  his mother’s feet, and the men who came to touch the tender hem of Eve? He will never take the breast for granted: he’s unlatched but keeping his moist claim on the roused, thick nipple, the dark stem of the milkfruit.  A zealot in some other century made a crude point— he X’d the serpent’s grin and slit Eve’s knee and wrist as if to cut key tendons of the will. But when he turned to mar the face and breasts and umber crux of her legs, he threw down his blade, and wept.  Mother of the bone button and the tiny teeth of the zipper, of burnt roasts and spilt perfumes, of lipstick on the wineglass, Mother of the warmth beneath the quilt and the gamy scent, the rowdy baby and the stretchmark, the stealthy tumor and the neurosurgeon’s knife— Mother who made the bed we love to lie down in— give us this day our same, sweet flesh, our bodies that have borne the brunt of miracles...