Abram Kaplan

A sonnet.  Eve was curious but bold.



Adam wondered if the branch above



could hold her.  He watched Eve’s body unfold



above and touch the fruit.  “I think this fruit



 



was made,” she said.  He once



regretted her, so limber, not content



to name.  Chaos of time and dance…



Adam engaged to teach her to relent:



 



“The stars, their motions false, untimely.  Earth



is here.  The triangle has properties



no matter what.  The mind too can give birth



to number, natural law, mythology.”



 



The will to teach was gone.  The pomegranate



seeds were gone.  They were gone.  A sonnet.

I wore her

disorder as a

raincoat

for the spring of tears.

I took her voice.



Shivering, I

went over

the insights of her diary

with a pen

in a fat blue book that made up

for my not having

a body that spring.



I wanted to be the man she loved

who loved her

shivering.  I wanted to know what it’s like

to have desire.



* *

I went off

to find it

in the desert,

which is savage



but where rabbits are.

And ravens,

wise enough to know

you have a gun

when you walk across the field.

I never plowed that field.



On the low road

hardly visible

I took that gun to where the old car carcasses

lay, thick with

rabbits, &

I plowed that field.

I didn’t leave a grave.

In my dream the old woman had a ribbon for the boy



and the ribbon had a message.  What to make



of this.  That the woman I dreamed of had a penis



on her knee she could find no one to hold.



That the man who is central plays guitar



and all he wants is to be loved.



 



I seemed to be that man whose death is his security,



whose stony head will model stony crown.



Who turns away predators with assiduity



dips his head to swallow wide



reflections in the body.



 



The brain’s a map that’s flat.



Don’t expect to feel the incision.



Nerves don’t end there.

Maui is across the finger of sea.  Four birds



Abandon their trees and bob.



I woke them up.  As I go to get my book



I see a spiderweb marking each



Room, and more besides.



Mine wags and like a soap bubble is pastel.



An empty hexagon marks where a fly was,



At the top.  The spider is exactly in the middle.



 



Three other spiders are in sight.  One wants



To make his web where one’s web already is.



Why don’t I see this more, one spider



In another’s web?  Why is it this way, that the webless



Seek the most precarious?



Twenty-seven lines hold the marked web up.



                        *** 



This island rose up to receive the bird but it



Received the palm.  It was naked and



Shallow and fish-shaped to mark its origin,



Out of the sea.



We swam in its mouth.  The coconut,



Readied by a reflex in seawater, settles,



Converting its own flesh into a tree.



 



A bobbing coconut, readied by its passion, refuses



To open.  No.  It lands and it opens



Canopies.  It bursts and is still and frondlike is



No spider.  The trunk achieves the sky.  Each frond



Blackly breaks the light.

        “There is no darkness

behind the sun” you say, you who have not

seen the sun in months, it being winter.

You thought about it once and couldn’t

stop, calculating volumes, investigating

temperatures of surface and depth.

You don’t remember depth.  You don’t remember

color, you spent days searching for a lamp

the color of the sun.

The sun is not a color but a disk

whose wavelength resonates your skin.



Plato mistook the good for the sun,

that day in Amsterdam the clouds parted,

you leapt up from the war memorial and

the world had been given back

finally.  You heard of people lost their eyes this way.