More on: Adam and Eve

IN A SCENE from book 4 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve talk one evening of the glories of Eden and their unmerited free creation by God, unaware that they are being watched by Satan. This little scene takes place shortly after Satan’s shape-shifting arrival in Eden and serves as a kind of foreshadowing…

Do you know the taste of Eden?— the history of the world is on your lips: apples and sin! Fingertip to fingertip God electrifies the elite elect: Adam on the Sistine Chapel, while the devil is on the lam. Who sold Adam to the worm?—script of dust to dust in death’s kinship— God took up…

I think he planned it, sort of, from the start; whether he knew they’d choose the fruit or not, he scattered hints around the garden, what to do in case they got themselves kicked out. A shirt of fur around the lamb. The stream converting water into syllables. Bamboo pipes. The caps of mushrooms round…

She is so beautiful, it is enough— her skin like milk, nipples like cherries, her hair a long night without stars. I find irresistible the blue vein pulsing above her left ankle, the green of those intelligent eyes. Everything she wants, I want, and though my mind is cleaved, my full heart can only rejoice.…

SOME YEARS AGO Charlottesville, Virginia, was abuzz with the news that a wealthy Roman Catholic couple on an estate near town had built a private chapel for worship and had commissioned a painting of themselves in the presence of a resurrected Jesus Christ. My wife was amazed; what effrontery! I defended the couple, pointing out…

Figure and Landscape in the Work of Enrique Martínez Celaya   “Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth….” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. —Genesis…

When Adam saw her, muscle of a new day, when he squatted to smell the musk between her legs, when he leaned down To grasp the wrist of the most familiar creature he’d encountered yet, to pull himself, the mirror image of himself, to her feet; When he took a few steps back to appraise…