Paradise

In this summer,
in this garden of the last days,
in the place where I can only dream of the dead
and the ways they traveled to their graves
through particles of God and blood—
I am weary of the smell of the sweetness
at the bottom of the glass and the residue
of what love has become.

In the play I love the most
Adam and Eve become fire and water
and dance almost boiling near the flames.
When she decides to finally leave the garden,
divorce herself from something less than paradise,
before there is nothing left of her shimmering self
nearest her beloved,
she falls first as tears,
then as rain,
and collects herself happily
in the shallows of the purest lake.

In the end Adam
swims at these shores
with Eve on his skin every day
and never knowing she was there
to make this quiet peace
with a love that cannot be controlled.

On the last day
she is transformed
into the woman she must be
and is consumed by the sun.