Another poem

Eve and Moonlight

Pishon, the straight, unwinding trench that stretched
its schoolgirl's brown, satin ribbon of water – its length
growing as tie-dyed as each season's green growth of weeds

would allow – across the school compound; watering barren mango trees,
and jamoon giants that grew wan with their want of purple
(the dead god's colour) fruit. Our linear, lesser Eden!

Remember, Ilona, those days and nights along it? When
I made you my moon; in some primal, nympholeptic lun-
acy worshipped you, selflessly – shamelessly, shallowly giving

my own soul as libation. O Ilona, Mother of all the living
verse I write! Mother of every living death we live!
I loved you then like there had never been

any woman on earth before you. My original sin,
the heart's vain transmutation of simple, nymphic flesh –
barren as rock – into an imagined, immortal light. I

can as much judge the moon – its nymph's white lie,
its petty larceny of sunlight – as indict the betrayal
within your nature. My moon, light, my own Eve, Ilona…

Once, this exile returned to Eden –
From the old bus the metal barrier seems,
in the hot glaze of day, a flaming sword

that, forgetting its duty, points to the sky.
In the guard hut, in a weathered old PGS uniform,
a half-senile, wrinkled, brown cherub sits and smiles.

The voices mingle, probing, sifting
through torn and perjured memories,
and the strange faces of familiar strangers.

The unshorn grass has grown, beard-like, around
the old Camp David canteen across the trench,
and then your face comes back to me

as bronzed and as glowing as the sunset
that afternoon there – that long-lost separate sphere
of beauty – when my whole world shone:

when the staid prose of this life was all poetry;
when your face was a metaphor for the setting
sun in the amber afternoon or the glowing moon

on that night when we laid, upside-down to each other,
along that thin wooden length of bridge the star-filled trench
below us – above, the inky, liquid sky – and kissed

a kiss filled with all the warmth of the enormous
night, and laughter, and our own kept records of
how many times our teeth had clicked together.

In this city, this other fucked-up Eden,
sometimes a space creates itself for me to see
the moon, walk under it, bask in its light,

its own by right – all the cold sun's alimony.
On those nights I am free to think that
maybe those wrongs were always ours, together;

that our souls and our sins were once one, the same;
or that I was prone to blaming you too easily; that
I was what your mother dreamt, that phallic hiss

in the womb of your brain - that first knowledge
of love, of art. In my heart you became the
creature of a mythic poetry - Lolita, Eve, Josie Bliss,

Walcott's Andreuille, my own Nereid, my Athena -
until Ilona Crispina could not exist. Married now
to the mundane, my life as painfully prosaic as

a laundry list, the months list pass, afraid of eras,
of naming each other any more than their given
names. And all the earth's now but one solitary

space, its one inhabitant, this lost lone soul, this art
searching for other metaphors, this heart with
its own brand-new chorus of shadows, this brain

banishing all its photographs of your face

O, genesis of pain, genesis of pain!