Eve as Woman and Wife

by Eliana Berger

I wonder what Eve saw as she gazed up at the tree of knowledge. Is it the branches like words, like music, twisted together in patterns begging to be plucked, pulled apart, broken each for their own brilliance and threaded into one final crowning halo? Did she remember what God said when the snake spoke softly in her ear? Did she remember Adam?

She must have remembered Adam – his names. Who will Eve become? Wife. Mother. Small words, the kind that don’t bounce when you throw them. Little oneclap words. Eve looks at the tree and sees beauty in knowledge of all that lies beyond Adam because there has to be a beyond, doesn’t there? The sun falls so far. The distance glitters with the lure of yonders unexplored, uncreated, un-named. Eve sees the tree and she sees the shadows of sunlight she cannot touch and the bark thin as paper; the music hits her all at once, the internal brightness singing upwards from the roots. She sees the dirt, the beyond stretching even below her soles, and if she doesn’t bite she’ll spend the rest of her life digging for that light and all Earth be damned if she’d give Adam the pleasure of watching.

Eve takes the apple in her hand and it breathes.

Eve bites, and it’s like she can finally fill her lungs all the way to the top. She laughs and it is the Earth’s first laugh. She feels her teeth in her gums and her jaw in her face and each follicle of hair dancing to its own personal orchestra. She feels like poetry.

Eve wants. Eve knows. Eve is boundless as the uncountable stars and the millions of cells in a single blade of grass. If this is knowledge, Eve wants more. She bites again. The fruit is clear and clean. She chews, and waterfalls splash down her throat in joyous choruses. She can hear Ross Gay dancing with Cole Porter. She can follow the steps, waltzing across the garden in patterns that won’t be known for hundreds of years. Her feet cross time at lightspeed and she sees the Earth turn to dust and cries for the beauty it held and for the thousand universes its dust will become. 

Eve names nothing. To see is enough. To be is enough.