Eve’s apple, was it
yellow, green, or red?

Red when she looked,
yellow when she picked,
green when she ate.

Green as new things often are—
light shoots and inner grasses.

In the garden, nothing but kindly beasts
and flowering boughs. Not even
a branch stout enough to give her a leg up

into a tree tall enough to serve as a lookout.
She wanted to look out, over the walls

to what was it?
Endless plains, a few scrub trees,
small shadows?

And without him.
Fondly touching all that they’d named
couldn’t go on forever.

Not to her taste, really, the garden without
the work, the children, the fear.