When nature no longer leads
and history takes its place,
its practitioners rehearse all the ritual steps
on the trading floor of memory, and
the dancers do not dispute whether
creation came of out nothingness
or chaos. They just do the dance.
Once, according to one telling,
the holiest of intentions barely
made it past the first week.
To eat of the fruit of good and evil,
with its wormhole into the future,
was bad enough. Heaven’s fear that
the tree of life would be next
became the pretext for exile.
Outside the gate, in their orphaned
world, the best that the first couple’s
children could devise was the act of
prayer, where they offered themselves
and their progeny as a pledge and
a sacrifice, drawing the outside in,
their insides out, a forever project
not just for disobeying God,
but for neglecting the garden.
—
Anthropologist and gerontologist Joel Savishinsky’s Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America won the Gerontological Society of America’s book prize. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and LIGHT Magazine award winner, his work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Cirque, The New York Times, Tiny Moments, and Windfall. The Poetry Box published his collection Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging. He considers himself a recovering academic and unrepentant activist.
