Eve
by Hannah Hinsch
You want to know
what I remember, my love, and I will tell you:
it is you I have known
and once knew,
יָדַע, yada,
a word in my mouth
forgotten as the taste of fruit,
choked with ash
in light of all we thought we knew.
I want to remember the place in you
where I unfold in orchid blooms—that vaulted garden
I touched from the inside
as though to mend your wound.
I want to taste again on your lips
the word
that woke me into thirst, the one, woman,
you spoke like a dream, a name dipped in honey
you knew before your own, before the spit and breath
and blood-red ground that formed you—
I want to remember where you entered me like pain
and like love (tell me you remember
when we slept beneath dark leaves, flush with rain,
limbs woven there like syllables in lovely, silent speaking?)
Please, do not remember (though how could I forget)
a tree’s scarred back
the cold bright skin of danger, the sweetest lie
that dripped in streams down the pillar of your throat
and lodged itself like bitter truth.
Remember, too, when his footsteps fell
soft beside a sad, unhurried calling, when he found us
wide-eyed dark, hidden in flesh
as bone (what was the phrase
you met me with, before?)
Tell me, find the words,
the heart, the form—recall
the one who walked in evening mist, water outstretched blue, his hand
an aperture of light, the one
who asked us though he knew,
the one who lances though he heals,
drawn together like a garment, all the way through
(the way the skin fell shorn to cover
your hips, reveal a muscled
thigh) and even now I cannot know
the whole of you,
only see
in parts, inarticulate
as the sweat I trace at your brow, though
blood and water are still speaking
from his side
in hushed and vivid words
(the very place I knew in you).
Hannah Hinsch writes to be with God. A current MFA candidate, her poetry and prose begins at the meeting place of word and being, the image and its attendant charge, a risen heat that sends a word in time and place and body, whether on the salt-soaked shores of Gig Harbor or the monsoon-warm of Santa Fe - and the grace to see God standing there. Find more of her work at hannahhinsch.com.
