Two Poems

Scott Cairns

The Entrance of Sin

Yes, there was a tree, and upon it, among the wax leaves, an order of fruit which hung plentifully, glazed with dew of a given morning. And there had been some talk off and on—nothing specific—about forgiving the inclination to eat of it. But sin had very little to do with this or with any outright prohibition.

For sin had made its entrance long before the serpent spoke, long before the woman and the man had set their teeth to the pale, stringy flesh, which was, it turns out, also quite without flavor. Rather, sin had come in the midst of an evening stroll, when the woman had reached to take the man's hand and he withheld it.

In this way, the beginning of our trouble came to the garden almost without notice. And in later days, as the man and the woman wandered idly about their paradise, as they continued to enjoy the sensual pleasures of food and drink and spirited coupling even as they sat marveling at the approach of evening and the more lush approach of sleep, they found within themselves a developing habit of resistance.

One supposes that, even then, this new taste for turning away might have been overcome, but that is assuming the two had found the result unpleasant. The beginning of loss was this: Every time some manner of beauty was offered and declined, the subsequent isolation each conceived was irresistible.

Jonah's Imprisonment

What might one then expect when fleeing the Lord's imperative? Well, an obstacle of one or another sort—uneasiness of mind, missed connections, ungenerous companions, perhaps an enormous fish.

That Jonah was without joy at the prospect of Nineveh is well recorded. Less famous is his disinclination for any intercourse with unbelievers, whom he, out of habit, identified as the unwashed. From birth, he had been protected from most embarrassments: body odor, poorly cooked food, substandard grammar. And so the Lord, in His compassion, undertook to deliver Jonah from his own sin—not fastidiousness as such, only Jonah's insistence upon it.

His time in the fish's belly was like death. At the very least it smelled like death to Jonah. In retrospect, the experience, fully imagined, might still provoke a necessary sense of how the body, unadorned by ointments, oils, or silk is little more than meat, mere meat for fishes. And if, in that confusion of digesting debris, Jonah chose to distinguish himself from other meat, he would have to come up with other criteria, and pretty soon.

Consider any brute swimmer driving with all his energies against the tide; notice how ineffectual (and potentially comic) the effort appears from the chalk white cliffs above.
Gross facts aside, the monster was Jonah's deliverance, a more than sufficient transportation to a more likely perspective, from which Jonah was then fully willing to embrace anybody.

Visit Scott Cairns as Artist of the Month for September 1999

Issue #5 •Spring 1994