October Poem of the Month

I'm sorry I missed September! I started a new teaching job, which requires much more of my time than my previous jobs. I'm hoping to get back into posting now that the first month has passed and I'm feeling more at home.

Here's an old poem I just rediscovered recently. At first I couldn't even remember writing it, but then I recalled the first time I taught Milton's Paradise Lost--this is [obviously] from that time.

Evitable?

And so. Eve reaches her fingers past
the prohibitive gap to grasp the little globe.
She feels cold—unfamiliar, frightening—tightening her skin,
numb tingling along her veins, a sharp new something—
pain—dash down her radius, and hears three drops
of unknown red splash on the ground. She thinks she hears
a screaming—sound unheard before—and falling buildings,
crashing planes, exploding bombs (what are these noises?).
She pulls back her hand—and cannot. Inertia draws her down,
down, into the fruit of that transgression.

Adam watches. He sees her hand go through the leaves
and disappear. Startled, he turns to her face. A twist takes her lips, a crinkle
mars her till then unwrinkled head, and lines twine around her eyes. Ugly,
he thinks, shocked by the foreign word. Then colour runs
across her body, takes it in: a strange white-yellow shade
stretches and dries out her skin. His cry is hers, and for her, and he knows—
though he has never seen a corpse—this is that Death and they
were warned. He moves to stop her, save her, but they are one,
his soul is in her body, he has already sinned.

God sees their hands, faint images of His
outstretching immanence with men, plunged through the space
He fixed. He names the cold, faint, pain, and blood they feel
with sorrow of His own, and yet He also sees
the fruit. Its sphere, the universe. It travels where
her human words find form, past terrestrial lungs, beyond
the beating central core. Its rind slips off. Its flesh
grows one with hers, a poison and a nourishment.
Its seeds alone are left. Deep in the empty
dark of her, He touches them. They are His seed,
and that of man. SomeOne will be born.
This is not, and it is, exactly what He planned.

-- Sørina