MICHAEL BAZZETT

Breathless

Today I rose and put on summer
clothes and sat in the corner chair.
I can't say when I first settled
into the habit of noticing wind
in the trees. I do it and wonder
about how things began. Wind
and leaf-shimmer: the all of it.

If you read the first book, it was
finished at chapter one: in the image
he created them, male and female
he created them. But then this
out of clay, that from the other:
the lack of childhood memory,
rapt in dark bone and suddenly

woman, stunned in the new
light, the necessary thrum of bees
pulsing everywhere and nowhere—
she closed her eyes to shut it out.
He didn't know good, evil, her name.
It was orchard and garden all around.
They must have found themselves

locked into a position that left them
breathless. Because there was a first time—
even and especially without words
to ask or raise the possibility of asking
like even and especially or how was it
because there was nothing but garden
all around and no shadow of leaf-litter
beneath the outline of even a single tree.