Springtime seems appropriate for considering poems about the Garden. I mean the Garden, the biblical one. Adam and Eve’s encounters there continue to fascinate poets, right up to Richard Jones’s “Adam Praises Eve” in the current issue of Image (#57).

In Jones’s poem, what Adam is praising Eve for is her physical loveliness. “She is so beautiful, it is enough—” the poem begins. Enough, it turns out, for Adam to desire spending his life with her even expelled from the Garden. For Jones, the very concept of original sin is replaced by “original love,” which he celebrates as a liberation. The poem ends like a splash of refreshment:

She reaches for me. I am suddenly
ashamed, but with original love
she takes my hand and leads me,
broken and free, out of the garden.

Eve’s “reaching” here for Adam immediately reminded me of Scott Cairns’s very different but equally illuminating way of re-imagining what happened between Adam and Eve in the Garden. In Cairns’s prose poem “The Entrance of Sin,” (from his sequence “The Recovered Midrashim of Rabbi Sab” (in Cairns’s collection Philokalia), the point is that sin entered the Garden “long before the serpent spoke…. 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.”

Eve “reaches” lovingly for Adam, as in Jones’s poem. But in Cairns’s darker vision, rather than embracing her gesture as a liberation, Adam rejects it. And this initial denial imperceptibly develops into a “habit of resistance” formed in both Adam and Eve during their otherwise delightful life in the Garden. Even worse, both come to enjoy this habit of “turning away.” Profoundly, disturbingly, the poem ends: “The beginning of loss was this: every time some manner of beauty was offered and declined, the subsequent isolation each conceived was irresistible.”

Cairns is punning with the word “conceived” here; Adam and Eve conceive isolation instead of conceiving babies. But his “conceived” recalls for me yet another Garden poem, one where conception (of babies) is the core. It’s Lucille Clifton’s short “adam and eve” (from her sequence “some jesus” in Good Woman):

the names
of the things
bloom in my mouth

my body opens
into brothers

I love this poem for its re-envisioning the Garden and its aftermath as a celebration of creativity. Adam’s naming of all the things in the Garden becomes a “blooming” in his mouth; Eve’s body “opens” into brothers—not only the two brothers she’ll conceive, the poem implies, but into brothers everywhere and through all time. It is possible, the poem invites us to picture, that our world could be one of blooming words and brotherly harmony.

However, Clifton’s next poem in the sequence, called simply “cain,” shows this possibility of harmony being shattered—by Cain’s murder of his brother. Clifton envisions sin entering the world not with Eve but with Cain. So she shares Richard Jones’s displacement of “original sin” away from Eve’s temptation by the serpent. And actually Cairns does too. In his prose poem, it is Adam who initiates the rejection of proffered love which starts humankind on its sinful path.

Poets in the Garden. And there are many, many more. I recall, for instance, Jill Peláez Baumgaertner’s sequence “Leaving Eden” (in Finding Cuba), where—as in Jones’s “Adam Praises Eve”—the expulsion from Eden is imagined not as loss but as opportunity for a fuller, richer human life.

What brings so many contemporary poets into the Garden? I’d surmise it’s the chance to probe the essence of our human nature. Because there at the very beginning stand Adam and Eve in their nakedness, through which we are all exposed.