Rise to Fallen Eden

The keener eyes caught it:
A tree branch, animated,
Limbless and vertebral

Slinking skyward in perfect levity
As though drawn up, weightlessly, from the teeming roots
By those winding laurels’ foliate fingers

Through mercurial motion,
Portraying time’s firm refusal to be captured
In restless portraits of eternity
Slipping through the thin waist of the hourglass.

What mystery compelled that viewless light,
Shading wordlessly—because unsayable—out beyond the borders of all senses,
To densify until a tower of bone, draped in writhing musculature, arose there

Only to yearningly reascend,
Blindly groping through pulse after serpentine pulse,
Springing from a dark, abyssal urge

Toward the all impossible goal:
That uncreated fount, Spring and Source of all perishing things
Sleeping deeper within that snake than its own death—
while we keep insisting, so obstinately, on keeping death divided and opposed to smokefleeting life?

And what, then, of Eden?
Of that hissingly whispered temptation that still meets every forlorn heart?
The momentous pull to finally vanquish the unsolvable riddle of yearning and possess that swelling, aching sweetness dangling from the branch

As though time, in all its liquidity, could freeze solid,
The heavy sands suspended, frictionless,
excused from gravity’s lawful rule,
Freed of all pain and parting beneath a glistening moon,
Perpetually nourishing and never waning.

The serpent makes no conceit,
For it knows more, unfathomably more than we, of Angels,
Of their long buried secret that we still refuse to see,
All the while hiding our refusal, with the guile of thieves, from ourselves,
Ravenously driven by longing for beauty spared from suffering, for life saved from everlasting parity with death.

The Angel, perched beyond all bounds,
apprehends the terrible beauty of it all,
Already forgiving without the slightest demand of alteration,
Abiding in supernal reconciliation’s total rest, casting compassion’s warm luster upon every sundered soul’s unfolding without the least drop of compromise or favoritism,
seeing wholly without aversion, feeling fully without without refusal or restraint, loving every terrible twist of fate perfectly and unconditionally.

There stand the primordial pair,
Suddenly naked and, for the first time, dreading the foretaste of impending pain in every screaming fiber,
Crying out to heal the inconsolable rupture that so vividly burns yet never was.

Silently, their hands conjoin,
Prior to the surging forth of time itself,
Echoed and recollected in every inscrutably lovelocked gaze.

Ascend the tree to fallen Eden,
Knowing that the burning garden, seen perfectly,
Is loved all the more deeply for its fall.