Narcissus Under a Saffron Sky

Here’s a poem of mine that appeared (a few years ago) in Lydwine Journal. They’ve got a great new(ish) issue up. Please check them out.

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Narcissus Under a Saffron Sky

The red sun, flinging saffron threads across the sky, lowers 
to the curved horizon of mountains, sea, a sailboat bobbing 
on the waves, stuck in the dead air.  Its owner leans 

over the edge, his fat knees planted like stakes
in the seat cushions, his face, slick and gray, as he looks 
into the water, the swirling mass, the irredeemable, hard 

malleability of it. With one flick of his wrist, he could toss 
anything overboard, watch it fall into another realm 
like Adam and Eve, flung from the garden, the angel’s sword 

at their backs, the taste of sweetness corrupting on their tongues. 
Even as they ate, innocence cracked, like a bone bent to breaking. 
Oh you, my first parents, you who heard the voice of God 

like a mother’s whispered song and were held in the arms of the Lord 
like children by their father, what blurred reflection did you see 
in that shiny fruit? What sound knelled in your ears as you scurried 

into the newly wounded world? And how can I, the child of your child, 
I who have not beheld the face of God, how can I know His voice? 
I am part of the herd torn from the hollow of eternity, stained by the Fall, 

that first turn away from goodness towards the flick of the serpent’s tongue. 
Now, priests prepare for a black mass and we throw babies into the deep, 
insatiable chasm, slick with other sacrifices. Like our first parents, 

like Narcissus, we kneel at the lake, stare at shiny things.  We gaze 
upon ourselves, the dead already forgotten, the world only a frame, 
the stakes unseen. The man in the boat kneels toward his own reflection

while the sky is lit with stars and the horizon curves back to the garden. 
The cross rises from the hollow of eternity. The angel's sword is sheathed. 
Adam and Eve are naked again, sated. The serpent is silent. And all of us,

their children, are clear eyed, unherded, our souls retrieved 
by the hard malleability of that strange grace
that restores innocence, bone by bone, face by face.