A Strange Hatching

A Strange Hatching 

Once there were other gardens, other plots,

Other clots of clay.

The old gods remembered.

Cast from their temples, stripped of tribute and gilt,

They kept their camp beside the pagan Nile.

Then they beheld a land of light where nothing hissed,

Nothing slithered or slipped,

Nothing crawled or slunk through sedge and reed.

The old gods smiled darkly.

The maker had forgotten scales,

Forgotten fang and feather,

Forgotten fin, fluke and claw,

Forgotten the sly wisdom of reptile and water.

II

Into Eden they flew,

Owl-screeching through mist, flapping shadows

Over lily-grazing beasts

Innocent of tooth and blood.

Into the brainstem of a stunned ape

A needle enters.

And a rib is drawn from its side.

The ape longs for increase, desires his mate

Wet and pliant and fruitful.

Six nights her belly conspires

A hatching. The seventh yields

Twin sons from a nest of hair.

One son is an Apollo with a shepherd’s staff

And a fluent tongue.

He speaks his own name into speech: Abel.

He is the lightness of air

Left behind by breath.

The other son is lustrous black.

Dumb with no music in his ears.

Amphibian-skinned with a serpentine mouth.

He is the mud

Beneath the white footprint.

Abel, being beautiful, beautifies.

He passes among the beasts, naming them into beauty.

Then to his parents he turns. Makes them upright

In the light. Adam sheds his muzzle;

Eve, her season of heat.

But his brother goes unblessed, unnamed.

Neither man nor beast,

He resists all beauty.

Fit only for silence and long exile,

He is cast beyond the garden.

III

One evening, a shadow at the kitchen door:

A lizard-like creeping on the porch.

A night-robber perhaps, a snub-nosed viper

Come to sup from my sister’s cup.

In the doorway: a thing.

Tough cracked hide.

Needle teeth.

Blue lips.

He slips in and nests among us.

Says nothing. Grins for days.

Indignant, I think murder.

I am not his brother.

I am not his keeper.

There he sleeps in my bed,

That grin spreading

Its purple shadow across long-jawed cheeks.

An idea pecks through the shell of thought.

A slender silence howls in my ear.

I stand above him:

Heart, drum;

Hand, rock;

Fist, stone;

Arm, knife.

Outside, grasses whisper. Night-birds shriek.

A serpent circles the chamber pot.

I sense a groaning upon the earth.

Beneath the floor I hear the Nile.

Either I mark him or he marks me.

My arm rises.

Need I go on?

IV

Brother, the blow was struck long before the hand.

Before the stone.

I see him now

As I should have seen him then

In the garden.

He was never in my bed or at my door.

He is crouched among the Nile’s grasses

Where the old gods bide amidst mud and reed.

Yet when I close my eyes,

The river flows through sleep.

His face rises from the water.

His silence fills the room.

V

Now there are many gardens, many plots,

Many clots of clay.

The old gods have done their work.

They keep their camp inside men’s brains.

They behold the world

With all its hissing and slithering.

The gods smile darkly.

For every thing named, another unnamed.

For every garden planted, a little Egypt.

Men carry serpents in their hearts

And call them wisdom.