We were not born
mindless vessels. Spare ribs,
whose brains burst into being with that bite.
Good looks will do no good, you know,
despite popular myth. That’s right –
you heard me, brains are a gift
and not from God, oh no.
An apple, single apple in her hand.
She looked and looked,
the snake from at her heels,
smirking, teasing, seducing –
“Oh, go on. Just one bite won’t hurt.
You know you want to.”
You see, she
was stuck in that garden
with nothing but a man
for years. And he
was no Brad Pitt,
I’ll tell you that –
no Tom Cruise, or Cary Grant.
And it gets boring, after a while
to garden, tend to plants,
with nothing else to do.
So she set to.
Bought endless books –
Einstein, Chaucer,
Tolstoy, Pasteur. All men.
Exceeded them.
Moved on, wrote her own –
under pseudonyms, of course.
(What man would ever read a woman’s work?)
Shakespeare, was her favourite,
Hemingway, another –
Joyce, Darwin, Aristotle. All were her.
Moved onto art: Da Vinci, Monet,
Picasso. Went Italian, English,
Spanish, German, French.
(And fluent, too, in languages of men)
But in that garden, Adam
wandered, mindless. Not knowing that his wife was off
opening galleries, drinking tea
with Van Gogh. Laughing with Queen Elizabeth
over a plate of scones –
Those men, they think we listen to them? The fools.
Came home,
late one evening, wearing a new dress
presented to her by Coco Chanel herself,
and Adam, blind as usual,
wondered what had changed.
“You’ve had a haircut? Painted your nails?
Bought new shoes?” No, no and no.
(She had said once, heavy with irony,
“Wouldn’t date him if he were the last man on the planet.”)
Thank God he was the first.
Eventually, tired of him, she sent him off –
“Go do something useful, please. Something men do,
like cut down trees, or eat, or something. Anything.”
So off he went,
and when he returned, apple smears round his mouth and newly clothed,
in possession of “intelligence”
and God stuck His nosy head down into her world
to reprimand them for eating the fruit
and Adam said “It was her! Not me! She
did it first – she’s the worst, punish her.”
God believed him.
Of course He did.
Kicked her out of that stupid garden,
and, her hand still sore from all that writing,
straight under this rosy glass ceiling.
And after that,
locked out of Eden,
with Adam trailing at her heels,
she smiled, because her secret lay
beneath the shadow of the tree:
that juicy, tempting, tender apple,
a doorstop at the gates of knowledge,
Snow White’s apple, Newton’s apple,
the golden apple of Hercules,
lies where it fell,
still in that garden,
whole –
untouched by woman’s lips.
