Eve

I never knew what you saw in yourself, 
but you'd have given yourself lovely notices, 
counting my ribs to see if one were missing. 

The hot and bothered noons lure Cuban anoles 
to the verge—dark, bullet-eyed immigrants. 
Our native patrician species, less seen every summer, 

has taken to the trees, forsaken as gods. What changes 
changes so slowly not even memory can be precise. 
The past comes round like a salesman again— 

who would have thought the roads would be full 
of Volkswagens, their third great age! 
Commerce has its converts: our mail shuttles 

through the Satanic mills of the telephone. We're back 
where the Victorians began, with hourly deliveries 
and even less to say. Eden was a version of the subtropics 

in which we knew what was forbidden: unshaven hair 
furred your inner thighs, the afternoon you explained, 
in languorus detail, why you could never love me, 

not an exit line but an exit wound.