This Way Out

“Did you bring it?” asks naked Eve of Adam
in great Dürer’s engraving. She doesn’t adore him
yet, has been inattentive all morning to his string
of loose poses as Dürer sketched the more striking

ones—those showing what Adam might do with a chance
at pleasure, what transaction or recherche choice
he might take. Indecision is not easy in intaglio,
where each line is final, so the space for them in fallow

metal has waited for months: they’re uninscribed ghosts
worked into a forest where even new winds won’t gust.
Still, there is an accident, or, at least, an elision
in this Eden: one tree offers the odd apple and, by extension

of botanical law, clustered branches of fig leaves
so that lovers might feast and dress without loss
of time, too much wry talk, or the dread Voice
intervening. Yet Dürer dithers about Adam’s vice—

Eve has already divided a piece of fruit with the snake
and concealed another behind her snugly-worked back
by the time the engraver chooses Adam’s right hand.
At first he had tried it grasping a staff, then it hurried

fruit from a twig—it fastens at least to the Tree of Life
and lets Eve do the sinning. “Love,”
Adam now seems to be pleading, reaching like a drowning
sailor with his other hand, the left, which even in the drawing

curls mostly around nothing. Yet Eve’s lush thigh
is reachable—he tries and tries to touch it, though
to do so he has to stretch past scenery packed
with meaning. No, dear, he hasn’t yet plucked

it, brought it, dug it up or fallen for it—
in his first great lapse, muscle-draped Adam forgets
the tree he clings to, whose plaque: “Albrecht Dürer
of Nuremburg Made This” swings like a tiny, mis-hung door.