Eden--Emily Grosholz (1992)
In lurid cartoon colors, the big baby
dinosaur steps backwards under the shadow
of an approaching T-rex
"His mommy going to fix it," you remark,
Serenely anxious, hoping for the best.
After the big explosion, after the lights
go down inside the house and up the street,
We rush outdoors to find a squirrel stopped in straws of half-gnawed cable. i explain,
trying to fit in the facts, "The squirrel is dead."
dinosaur steps backwards under the shadow
of an approaching T-rex
"His mommy going to fix it," you remark,
Serenely anxious, hoping for the best.
After the big explosion, after the lights
go down inside the house and up the street,
We rush outdoors to find a squirrel stopped in straws of half-gnawed cable. i explain,
trying to fit in the facts, "The squirrel is dead."
No, you explain it otherwise to me.
"He's sleeping. and his mommy going to come."
Later, when the squirrel has been removed,
"His mommy fix him," you insist, insisiting
on the right to know what you belive.
The world is truly full of fabulous
great and curious small inhabitants,
and you're the freshly minted, unashamed
Adam in this garden. You preside,
appreciate, and judge our proper names.
Like God, I brought you here.
Like God, i seem to be omnipotent,
mostly helpful, sometimes angry as hell.
I fix whatever minor faults arise
with bandaids, batteries, masking tape, and pills.
But I am powerless, as you must know,
to chase the serpent sliding in the grass,
or the tall angel with the flaming sword
who scares you when he rises suddenly
behind the gates of sunset.
In Emily
Grosholz’s “Eden,” readers listen to the discourse of a mother to her
child. The way she talks allows readers
to infer that perhaps the child is not listening; the mother may simply be
musing these fearful thoughts in her head.
After all, to confide many of these thoughts to her child would only
expedite the process she hopes to avoid.
This poem exhibits that, though loss of innocence is inevitable in the
scheme of life through maturity, it is still a tragic loss.
The poem opens with the mother
speaking of vivid and harsh “lurid” colored cartoons (Line 1). This unnaturally bright scene reflects the
unnaturally bright disposition that many children possess. The use of colors will become significant at
the very end of the poem. In the end of
the poem, the mother references a sunset.
This image evokes thoughts of an array of colors yet again; however,
these colors are natural. This reflects
the understanding a child gains as they mature, a more natural understanding of
the world. The sunset also serves to
show the ending or death of a “day.” In
this case, the “day” represents childhood and the innocence that accompanies
it.
As we move to the second stanza in
the poem, the mother speaks of a “big explosion” in reference to a power outage
(Line 6). She is likely using her
child’s vocabulary to emphasize the way children often find ordinary events
amazing and fantastical; this is a blessing of youth that adults often
tragically leave behind. It is easy to
dismiss the small things in life as ordinary instead of taking time to
marvel. In this stanza, the child
encounters death a second time. The
mother attempts to “fit the facts” which evokes a sense of attempting to put
together a puzzle (Line 10). After this precarious struggle, she bluntly tells
her child that the squirrel has died.
Moving on to the next stanza the child replies that the mommy squirrel
will fix this; mommies fix things is this child’s reality. Therefore, the child shapes all other
experiences around this fact. The third
stanza closes with a seemingly paradoxical phrase “the right to know what you
believe” (Line 15). This is the center
of the poem, and it leads us to a change from the occurrences of the day to the
deeper thoughts of the mother.
In the fourth stanza the mother
alludes to The Bible she calls the
child, whom we now know to be her son, as an “unashamed Adam” (Line 18 &
19). This compares the child to Adam who
was completely and happily naked in the Garden of Eden. The child wears his ignorance of death,
ignorance of weakness, and childlike illusion unashamedly like nakedness bare
and unaltered. He does not even have an
understanding of shame. This is a
beautiful image of untainted innocence; it is reflective of complete
contentment. However, drawing upon this
allusion, the mother is unable to avoid its progression.
She goes on to compare herself in
her son’s eyes as God. These two parallel
reflections on herself as God reveal the speaker’s attitude towards God. Although motherly, she comments that God can
be “angry as hell” (Line 23). This
negative light of God appears to stem from the mothers own fear, remorse, and
frustration at being unable to prevent her own son from The Fall. This fall is not a fall of sin, but it is a
fall that will remove his innocence.
Like God chose not to intervene during Adam’s fall, so parents must
chose to one day release their children.
This inevitability lends to the
closing of the poem. The last stanza
reads like a confession. “I am
powerless, as you must know,” she says to the child (Line 26). She proceeds to
allude to The Fall. She speaks of the
“sudden” appearance of the “angel” (Line 28). Like the loss of innocence, it is a scary
occurrence. Yet, few of us can ever recall
quite where we lost it; it’s a sequence of events. Like Adam tasting the apple, seeing things
anew, hiding, confessing, and being cast out, we all slowly leave our gardens. We are cast into a world where we experience
a new and more painful form of nakedness.
