Self portrait with closed eyes
like a brumal serpent
listening to Earth
shed her crystalline
skin, slip off her chill
at dawn’s seductions
supple as hibernacula
warm with bodies
slendering into instinct
and appetite €”Eden’s
infinite metaphors
sidled up to God’s breast,
areola iron on the tongue,
milk rich from desire’s simmer
and slow burn, the flame
set low so not to sear the soul
still this side of vision, lurking
like the mourning dove’s
anti-climactic elegies
teasing Eve from her
backwoods mythology
heavy with temptation’s
pome and tang and the rasp
of cherubim wings strung like
words along Lucifer’s tongue
as he conjures shame from
her constant wound €”fig
weeping matins in Eden’s half-
light while Adam snores
downwind, only stirs when
she’s roused scent enough
to slip into his dreams
as the rib slipped from his side
the morning God stopped by
and found the basket of figs
he’d left last visit
still sitting on the altar,
thrumming with June Bugs
undone in the eating, mad
with the zephyr’s rasp
through the scales of the constrictor
stretched at sleeping Adam’s side.
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“Self portrait with closed eyes” is Tyler’s ekphrastic response to the painting “Self Portrait with Eyes Closed” by J. Kirk Richards that appears at the tip-top of the poem.
For Tyler’s bio and links to more of his poems published on WIZ, go here.