The Zones of Paradise

EVE AT THE LOUVRE

EVE ATTHE LOUVRE Yet your desire shall be for your husband. ––Genesis : There we are, framed in the familiar mug shot: our bodies bewildered by your mismatched fruit and the smooth terra incognita of my belly. I’m raising the first, tart, nuptial toast as our best-man-and-bridesmaid holds his sneaky peace. I remember those orchards––every tree but one striking the same, exact pose. And all the flowers synchronized along the straight and narrow path. But there were fragrances and fervors I remember, too: innuendoes of jasmine, the silky aims of tulips slipping out on the breeze .l.l. for it’s every garden’s goal to go to seed, to let the chickweed mix it up with coreopsis, to let white pickets smother in the pachysandra’s arms. No master from that old school could pick us from this crowd. We’ve lapsed to middle age, backslid from our perfect bodies-without-a-cause, from that clueless beauty, all undressed with nowhere to go. By now we’ve cried out in every octave of desire, thrown paring knives and skillets, licked mango from each other’s lips, and let tomatoes sit on summer’s sill and rot. Our plot has thickened and thinned for so long––.  They want to paint the fallout of The Fall? Then let them picture us in bed: up late and reading by our separate lamps, though lounging underneath a common quilt and with a shared agenda for the dark— two practitioners of paradise, of a bliss even better than the one we blundered through as God spit out the sweetest curse in all of Genesis.  ...