Eve

moon

we should be

more

 hungry

when we seek you.

We should

wait

inside what’s still

 wild,

 while it divides

its wide throat.

But without ache

we wander in,

senseless,

oblivious.

And on

our soft return

  we swallow only

 the tail

end of our

insatiable crave.

Hunger is conceiving,

a fruit

 of twelve score,

more, of days,

of taste and pain,

tongue severed

in a silence

that is a quiet

hiss,

a life sentence

of skin within

skin, blood making

blood, bone

growing bone.

moon,

have you considered

 Eve—how she,

after eating,

grafts

herself to the tree,

when Adam

 and the serpent

are belly to heel,

and with only paradise 

to see,

she splits

      at the mouth

  and glides

the lit stem end in,

its cognizant yield,

its phellem’s peel

  of pores and milky pith

hooked like birth,

the first to

realize her impeccant

 worth?  she

nursed there,

 from this breast end.

She conceived.  The sap

was her first considered word:

Imahot.

After this

She would lose her

very first three:

the tree,

the two sons.

She’d turn every stone

to seek them,

whet her lips

and eyes

until she was blind,

mute, cut from the root

of it all.

Somewhere, past dying

she'd transplant

it all into her tongue,

 beneath

 a bleeding place,

 a smote place

and a marked place,

hunger the only counsel

she ever heeded

or needed

 curled inside that tree,

before God

and Adam

rent the leaves

between her

 and the place she ran from,

the place she ran to.