Failure of Adam

When we begin to sin the road is not yet light
The sun has yet to have fully risen
The stars are still out in the embers of night
Un-creating Adam in a God-like frisson
In a swagger of the mystical
The moon leads the way like a pied piper
To the un-begun day

Un-sun,in unison with childhood memories of hay
And what is left is the failure of Adam

The license to kill was given him
In the hearthrug to decay
Next to a roaring fire where
His father spends his day
Cleaning up ashes, sweeping up soot
Clearing the chimney chambers then polishing his boot

Holding up the cinders of an unhindered world
Falling like the dust of empires into a bag of perfect pearls 

Taking stock of photographs, stored for memory
The gland which does the talking in his head
Is the one he must make free
Courting the disaster that is the consciousness of Eve

The last, the single plaster that may mend his wounded sleeve
For there he has worn his heart from the hour he first believed

Her own heart is on his sleeve she said
Do not wipe your tearful eye with it
When you contemplate the dead
They are gone as apostrophes in history
Silences in the pitta patter patois of eternity
All the rocky cliffs that chant infirmity
That edifice of Eden called infinity

That none can scale its garden walls
But must be let in its gates
It takes a mighty pride to succumb to such as its falls
It takes a river to cry over its loves and hates

Some such philosopher Rimbaud maybe
Told of these devices of the coming day
A tree to scale once there in
Of innocence it lies,
It grows neither to east nor west
It knows of no earthly prize
Yet in its fruits has mankind made a home for all his sins
The melting pot where to put the devil in

Its name is Nature it knows no law of man
Its laws are of God's creation its roots seek out his plan
Such is the arrogance of Adam
That he sees this tree as lumber
And every fruit and every leaf
As an economic number

He frames it in human terms
Tries hard to tame it
Forces it to follow rules he learns
From his greedy heart names it:
Tree of his possession, Beginner of his sin
Constructor of the pale confession
The water he drowns himself in
He calls this tree the Mother
For it cannot be male
She is the only other
Whose profession teaches Adam to fail

This tree flowers but once a year
In this he says is innocence reborn
In this her virgin tear
And yet "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"
As the roots reach down to a buried fear

They reach back farther to when the earth began
Before the concept of human fear or folly
Had even entered into God's master plan

They are irreconcilable, parallel roads that never crossed
And yet so close they could be twins
Two life forms, each others' ghost 
Mirrors, but to each other lost