|
Post by MoonyLuna on Dec 24, 2008 12:52:10 GMT -5
When Adam and Eve lived in the garden they hadn't yet learned how to forget. For them every day was the same day. Flowers opened, then closed. They went where the light told them to go. They slept when it left, and did not dream.
What could they have remembered, who had never been children? Sometimes Adam felt a soreness in his side, but if this was pain it didn't appear to require a name, or suggest the idea that anything else might be taken away. The bright flowers unfolded, swayed in the breeze.
It was the snake, of course, who knew about the past—that such a place could exist. He understood how people would yearn for whatever they'd lost, and so to survive they'd need to forget. Soon the garden will be gone, the snake thought, and in time God himself.
These were the last days—Adam and Eve tending the luxurious plants, the snake watching from above. He knew what had to happen next, how persuasive was the taste of that apple. And then the history of forgetting would begin— not at the moment of their leaving, but the first time they looked back.
Copyright Lawrence Raab
|
|
|
Post by MoonyLuna on Dec 24, 2008 12:52:48 GMT -5
Featured Poet Lawrence Raab
Lawrence Raab is the author of six collections of poems, including What We Don't Know about Each Other (winner of the National Poetry Series, and a finalist for the National Book Award), The Probable World, and most recently Visible Signs: New and Selected Poems, all published by Penguin. A new collection, The History of Forgetting, will appear from Penguin in 2009. He teaches literature and writing at Williams College.
|
|