Eve at 87

—after Toni Morrison’s “Eve Remembering” 

I remember still the reedy ache
like the saxophone's need
swelling the tiled underground
inside me—Again! I’d say
if you asked. To swallow every seed, 
to know the juice of anything! 
That story? Like an old billboard, its words
now bleached to papery skin in need of sloughing—
Oh, what I know of God is not without the gavel,
not merely its wooden crack—but what I know 
of the hand—the slick meat swell of lambing,
pink of my own cheek in the worm’s 
wet body, the pine’s promiscuity in spring 
chartreusing the world, the aspen’s bony fractals 
lacing the face of the mountain, autumn
strumming its amber ballads, summer
fields frothing with milkweed, the old girls
shaking out their hair, the ocean white 
with miles of herring milt and egg, seagull clamor 
hovering over glittering backs of their parents,
the hunger in every gelded landscape—
oh infinitely more! Could you dream what is past 
the carnival of temporary outbuildings, the trailers 
of belief, what lush grasses await, what whispers
there, what other prayers you haven’t yet
mouthed, even for the grip of shards, a hard snow—
you too could bloom past a theory of fruit. 
What is one paper bag’s quarrel with the wind
against the river’s muscling, its endless desire,
when every mouthless vine that seeks the light
is a prayer, when even the vulture 
wearing her blackened grief 
redeems the armadillo?