it doesn’t mean two shlubs like you and me
would be in Eden with them. God knows I
am partial to a slice of apple pie
and grew up filching off a neighbor’s tree
the peaches he intended for his nieces.
How many generations would the ruse
have lasted? Theologians float their theses,
but sin’s a firecracker with a fuse
that heaven’s ghostly glow can light as well
as any spark that fountained out of hell.
Can’t speak for you, though I suspect I do,
I’d grow so bored, I’d climb the wall with you:
A derring-duo, deathlessness-defying,
we’d sneak out into all that lively dying.
*****
Amit Majmudar writes: “If Eve and Adam Never Fell” continues a long tradition for me. For a reason unknown to me, I have written obsessively for decades about the fall from the garden of Eden, in fact by sheer volume of work it comes in third behind the Ramayana story and the 1947 Partition of India among my recurrent themes. “Subtle Anatomy,” for example, is one of my first ever published poems, way back in 1999:
Subtle Anatomy
by Amit Majmudar
An arm is the spine of an angel wing,
cracked at the elbow. Webbed for gliding once,
we could leap off of cliff or bridge or tower
and saw no problem with a leap of faith.
What happened to it? Ask the suicide.
After the battle in heaven, the good angels,
precursors to the Turks who shamed their captives,
carved and carted off those wings—atrocious—
a mound of wings more chilling than a mound
of skulls: in this case, the contributors
could watch the ground tumor swell. So you see
we have some angel in us, even if
it’s the bedeviled kind, stripped of its wings
like a drunk pilot, out of service.
Before Eve met the serpent, she was fleshier
than even Rubens’s palette could stomach
and spineless, literally. The serpent
dove in her through the nest-hole anus
until the scorpion-stinger coccyx
slurped in too, and she sheathed him whole.
He straightened her, the breath in a balloon,
into this human posture of rebellion,
this upright and bipedal challenge.
Settled, the serpent sent nerves everywhere,
claiming each inch of her with senses.
Not with an apple but an apple’s taste
the serpent ruined her, fossilizing
to the vertebral column. So you see
we have some devil in us too
and dead center at that
commanding everything.
previously published in The Journal of the AMA
*****
Amit Majmudar’s recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and Things My Grandmother Said: Poems (Knopf, 2026). His forthcoming book is a novel, Cervantes in Chains (Slant Books, 2027).
‘If Eve and Adam Never Fell’ was first published in The Sonneteer
Illustration: RHL and GPT-6 Astra Light
