I’d like to think that there was a trinity of poems
                         before the throb of the first human tongue,

that the words were thatched in raspberry,
                         that the rhymes were cleansed with mirth—each tongue famished

for the syntax of divinity.
                         What ivoried clauses could Eve have uttered

in that Eden of epithets?
                         If only I had been there when the first sentence braided

lives—utterance as ingress. It all digressed
                         when the pelican was singed by the glamour of the subjunctive,

when cygnet souls became lexicons,
                         when the persimmon was first christened. All I know is that the fruit’s peel held

pretense—its pith ripening,
                         bruising, throbbing on the lies of the first human tongue.