The Garden of Eden

Sandra Simonds

Vision of Baudelaire in this North Florida forest looking into the eye
of a lizard with green purple eyeliner zigzagging its way up a burnt log

Florida Yew, Olive, neon orange day moon mushrooms
over the white bluffs of the psychiatric Apalachicola River

Valéry says shells, flowers and crystals    are the privileged
objects of nature           harmonic underbelly,
endless, alien recycle      of gorge and interlude

George Michael died today       For I live in a bubble of joy
Go out into the sun!         the doctor says               your blood work
is totally normal   except for a            Vitamin D deficiency
and left the office behind     and unleashed my sentimentality

Lindos, Greece

Maybe silence adds to the pain
and maybe pain adds to the sea
and maybe the sea is only a reflection
of a ruin today
where the mind is unable to make out
how things used to be for us:
complete, with deities, a kind of 
order. Oh never mind the ATMs 
scattered throughout the medieval town
or the street art sprayed
into the air that says
Destroy what destroys you
But I destroy myself;
I destroy myself.

Sandra Simonds

2018

For Joe

Locked in the beauty of the pearl, far from frail,
         these people who claim to love us still
they don’t give up much, do they, sealed? To eradicate class—
      the looking glass of it, the complex glare: “Let me introduce
xxx, impoverished poet.” Winter let up
     like a terrible religion. In its wake, a politics came,
      profane. You were on a train
from Philly to Mass. Winter let up like bands and globes
      and globules and I could feel the trade ships
in my bloodstream, the blood that made me,

Sandra Simonds

2016

You Can't Build a Child

with the medicinal poppies of June
nor with Celan's bloom-fest of dredged stone,
      not with history's choo-choo train of corpses,
    not with Nottingham's Robin Hood
            nor Antwerp's Diamondland.

Sandra Simonds

2012

Poems

The Garden of Eden

More by this poet

Lindos, Greece

For Joe

You Can't Build a Child

Poems

Page submenu block

The Garden of Eden

More by this poet

Newsletter Sign Up