Here We Were Happy - Rebecca Starks

[Larry Robinson]

Here We Were Happy 

And still I fall back on the garden 
like a firebreak, as if its walls might contain 
the inferno sweeping through paradise, 
except this time they were given no warning 
because god is the municipal government, 
and the tree of knowledge is one of three
thousand palm trees planted from seed
and doused with dishwater until they can live
off the rain, and Adam and Eve are the poet
and his wife whose palms cupped the earth
like a child’s face, like water, saving with love
what was ruined by improvement, until 
they turned back to ashes laid beneath a stone,
because the tree of life is a banyan tree 
whose roots were hung with jars of water
and whose fruit is barely edible, famine food,
and even this wasn’t spared by the flames
sparked by the flaming swords of angels 
who guard the memory of what they destroy,
which are mostly faces, and the begots are us, 
shameless as the first begetters
professing innocence while stumbling on
comparison: it is like war, like a bomb went off 
to which the voice from the whirlwind replies 
Have you ever blown the top off a mountain
or changed the tilt of the earth?
Have you ever stoked the dragon’s breath
with burning grass, or hacked sugarcane by hand? 
Have you ever blacked out the moon 
so you could see the stars and the stars 
so you could see your own blindness? 
And the snake? you ask. The snake 
is the stardust between them. No, 
the snake is the words on the stone.

	- Rebecca Starks