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The Allegro Quartet

Book Two

Eden Lost

Michael Shea

Copyrighted in 2011 by the sole author, Michael J. D. Shea

©
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On sunrise tapestries of thought

The mind of great Jehovah wrought

A heaven where the sister-stars are mocking martial arts of Mars,

And shining like the day-dawn dew-drops silver vixens caught.

Another William writes some lines about the snow-white feet

Of vixens in the vineyards where the little foxes meet.

They gaze at sunrise tapestries the hand of nature weaves:

The silver vixens licking dew that sparkles on the leaves.

And so they tread, where thirst has led, on snowfall-silent feet,

Between the waves of sea-green grapes, where Eve and Adam meet.

Creating, Yahweh also made

The Earth where earthy Falstaff’s laid.

Jack’s fallen often, fallen soon, and fallen as the fallen moon

Descended from the heaven where the mind of Yahweh played.

And Will created Pistol. He’s a character who weaves

The shrouds for stiffs who lay with Nell on Stratford’s crimson leaves.

On autumn’s fallen glories, crushed beneath his cheating feet,

Jack Falstaff walks to where his bulk and eager mistress meet.

With silver threads of storyline, the callous Kismet weaves

A rope to hang the bounder under maple-leaving leaves.

We are the fallen human race.

We’re fallen as the leaves that trace

Their crimson form upon a flag above those characters who shag

On Terra’s green and grassy face.

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The angry God of barren Nod created Eden too:

Created little vixens that are walking through the blue

And golden parting of the night. Then rising rays of daybreak light

The morning of the planet and the dawning of the new.

The silent feet of vixens steal softly down the rows.

They’re stealing grapes of anger that the wrathful Yahweh grows.

They’re thieving from the vineyards that the God of Adam tends:

The God who smites, indifferently, his enemies and friends.

The angry God of barren Nod is storming down the rows

Where future strife, of hate-drunk fools in wine-drunk tumult, grows.

A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and Thou,

Jehovah, on an altar in the shadow of a bough:

A limb upon a tree of knowledge that will be

The downfall of the fallen from primaeval days to now.

And Will created Falstaff. He’s a character who tends

The flowers in his garden. For, he shares with women friends

A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and fragrance of the rose

That blooms within the wilderness: A paradise that grows

In beauty like the garden of the language Shakespeare tends;

The magic words that bring-to-being Falstaff and his friends.

And singing in the wilderness,

Jehovah’s seraphim confess

Great doubt about

A paradise the breezes bless.

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The angels have it right, because

Jehovah’s laws and human flaws

Will soon compound to find and found

The human is and Eden’s was.

And Yahweh isn’t angry with the foxes filching grapes

But rather, with the words and deeds of sundry naked apes.

They angle in the somber lakes where wrongs and evils dwell:

The primates who are fallen as the future that befell

Young Adam. He was innocent as children filching grapes

That feed the joys and happiness of Gaia’s naked apes.

Young Adam, when the world is young,

Considers songs the angels sung

About the grapes of wrath; when Falstaff takes a bath

In river water Yahweh flung.

In Stratford town, where kings and queens and knaves and varlets dwell,

The scuttlebutt’s about the butt of Falstaff. It befell

That Pistol kicked the lecher’s butt. Jack harvested the grapes

Of wrath that Pistol trampled down. Such retribution apes

The fate of Jack in Merry Wives, where wives and husbands dwell,

And laugh about the scenes and swans and swan-dive that befell.

Jehovah flung the rivers down:

The streams that flow like lines that crown

Will Shakespeare’s plays: Immoral ways

Of Jack, and God, earn Milton’s frown.

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The primal paradise was lost;

And Cain, in sorrow, tempest-tost.

For drops of blood his club had found cried out to Yahweh from the ground:

The seeds of fury’s endless cost.

And innocence was lost, for Cain had bloodied crimsoned boards

Of Earth’s vast stage; as Eve, in pain, and Genesis, records.

And Shakespeare writes of characters whose actions on the stage

Are typical of deeds and words that move their God to rage:

The God beholding victims’ blood that spatters crimsoned boards;

As Prospero, with tragic words in magic books, records.

And Eve, in pain,

Has prayed for rain

To wash away the human stain. And still, we hear the sad refrain

From souls who cry to God in vain.

Jack dove into the muddy stream, when hurtling off the stage,

Propelled by force of destiny and husbands’ vengeful rage.

And swans observed the lecher flying from the oaken boards,

As Shakespeare’s script so faithfully narrates, relates, records.

Thus Falstaff plays his Lear-like role; for all the world’s a stage

Where lechers feel bitter gusts when storms of vengeance rage.

As Eve’s great Book so faithfully records, relates, narrates,

The barb of fury forms a hook the lure of vengeance baits.

And in the stream of time the scrod are screwed by fate and gods and God

And other villains thought creates.

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Between the heavens and the Earth,

Between conception and the birth

Of Eden, Yahweh brought a lot of thought

To human woe and human mirth.

Those characters are vengeful as Jehovah, in a Book

Where Eve has penned her lines about the knowledge-tree that shook

When storms of Godly anger caused forbidden fruit to fall.

Those pomegranates land in hands of arrant knaves who crawl

Between the heavens and the earth, as written in a book

About the book where Hamlet wrote, as reason’s footing shook.

Jehovah never laughs or weeps.

God’s spirit moved upon the deeps;

And tried to understand the laughing, weeping band

(S)He would create when reason sleeps.

The stage and stream and storms unite within the springs that fall

Between the heaven and the Earth, where Hamlet’s varlets crawl.

In spring Jack springs, though heavily, toward Will Shakespeare’s book

Recording scenes upon the stage the wrath of Kismet shook:

The ire of the Fates who cause attendance stats to fall,

So money-flow becomes as slow as Avon’s turgid crawl.

And Hamlet’s crawling varlets find

That God was not of soundest mind

When Yahweh made humanity: The species sailing on a sea

Of thought no shoreline has confined.

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Eve saw Hamlet in the future: In the stream

Of time, where rippling sun and epochs gleam.

And heard abuse that would seduce,

To painful death, love’s gentle dream.

Will Shakespeare wrote that masterpiece where Hamlet speaks in verse,

And rails at Ophelia in lines that are perverse

As gusts of Godly tempests, when the Lord’s, or Lady’s, breath

Was spent in giving currency to threats of pain and death

That Eve recorded in her Book. And wrote, in truth and verse,

That Hamlet’s wrath would be misplaced: Displaced, and thus perverse.

Whence and what art thou,

Jack Falstaff? When the purple cow

Arrives, then roams through Eden Lost, will you endure the human cost,

Of truths, thou art not paying now?

In spring -- when Falstaff’s hormones romp like zephyrs breathing breath

And fragrance on the buds and shoots that conquer seeming death

And winter – Will has hope the fans will flock to hear his verse

Declaimed by hams whose acting isn’t bad. It’s worse -- perverse.

But fans remain away in droves invisible as breath

Escaping Falstaff when his life is born on tides of death.

The truths about our fallen state:

For Eden’s lost. And hope and hate

Are roaming, like the purple cow, through there and then, through here and now.

And loss and suffering await.

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Though (S)He hides radiant divinity behind a veil,

God condemned humanity to a trail

Of tears. Although refulgent, Jehovah, self-indulgent,

Permitted godly petulance to prevail.

Eve wrote that we’re created in the image of a God

Whose self-indulgent anger doomed the human race to Nod.

And Hamlet’s self-indulgent words of anger caused his girl

To suffer pain from verbal slings and arrows. Bullies hurl

Such barbs when they assume despotic powers of a god

Who romps upon Olympus while mortals mourn in Nod.

In Eden, Eve is quite naive:

She’s never seen a person grieve.

When Doll Tearsheet dies, Jack Falstaff weeps to see her born upon the deeps

Of death: Born to a death she can’t conceive.

Jack Falstaff, born the child of a little slip of girl,

Has trod through speeding decades that the hands of Yahweh hurl.

His life is born away on tides that take him to his God

When Jack has crossed the finish lines on cinder tracks of Nod.

Between the gurgling baby, who was cuddled by the girl,

And dying Jack lie racing years Jehovah’s fingers hurl.

Although Eve is quite naive,

She realizes she must leave

Her paradise: A pair of dice

Will roll the fate her years will weave.

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Now Eden’s lost.

And tempest-tost,

Jack feels the cold that’s taken hold

Within his soul: Jack Frost.

The great Jehovah’s vengeful as the sinners (S)He condemns,

Preparing Hellish fires for the womens and the mens:

Behaviour as irregular as plurals gone awry.

And breaking laws approved by that celestial Girl or Guy

Who said “I am who am”, when speaking English (S)He condemns,

Perplexing many womens and bewildering the mens.

Much better frost than fire. But Jack won’t go to Hell.

For Eve told off Jehovah; and she made the bully tell

The truth. Hell exists on Earth. But mortals’ sins will not give birth

To endless pain, though all we Eves and Adams fell.

And set adrift on currents gone aright and gone awry,

That girl exists in memories created by that guy.

Jack’s real parents? Shakespeare and the theatre. Fate condemns

Old Jack to lack a mother, quite unlike the mentioned mens.

The theater’s, rather, mother of the current turned awry:

The life of wrong directions lived by Tearsheet’s witty guy.

In the theatre that was Paradise,

The tree of knowledge would entice

Eve to take the center stage. And withstand blasts of Yahweh’s rage.

And pay, for truth, a fearful price.

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And Adam spoke, to Eve, about divine decrees.

“I’ve often eaten apples from Adam’s Pearmain trees.

But, cold and hard as mountain granite, a voice forbade the pomegranate.

So I will chicken out; and sail peaceful seas”

Then Yahweh spoke to Eden’s Eve, to promulgate decrees:

“For ignorance is better than the fruit of knowledge-trees.”

And Eve suspected knowledge was revealed by the hiss

Of words the serpent spoke, between the lines of Genesis,

When he derided those who like to promulgate decrees

And censor pomegranates on the emerald knowledge-trees.

Eve then spoke, to Adam, about the words of God.

“Don’t you find it exceedingly odd

To see that this tree continues to be

The root of knowledge and Nod?”

Jack Falstaff? Shakespeare’s character who hears the serpent’s hiss

Revealing carnal knowledge, when he speaks of genesis

Of people in attractions of the genders. Dumb decrees

By popes cannot dislodge the lures from Eden’s knowledge-trees.

In all these dozen volumes, Falstaff hears the serpent’s hiss

Advising him to question God, like Eve in Genesis.

“It isn’t the slightest bit odd,

Since God rides over you roughshod,

To see that this tree continues be

A snare and a trap. Respectfully, God.”

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The serpent in the knowledge-tree

Has flicked his tongue to taste the sea

Of truth that lies beyond the shores that Eve will see through opened doors

Of being that is yet to be.

In truth, forsooth, the verities about the frightened lies

That Adam told, when caught by God, are truths the snake supplies,

So sibilantly speaking in the Garden east of Nod.

Did Eve conceive a truth: Are we the likenesses of God?

Is (S)He reflected by the core of self-deceiving lies

That contradict those painful facts the truthful snake supplies?

Eve tells the truth. Jack tells some lies.

Jack gets the women. Eve, the flies

In the land of Nod: In the hand of God,

The scroll of fate decrees a cruel surprise.

Jack Falstaff is a son of Earth, and therefore son of Nod,

With earthy imperfections that amuse the Bible’s God.

And Yahweh’s entertained when Falstaff lies that when he lies

With Doll he’s springtime-strong. His braggadocio supplies

Those tunes of glory. Melodies in searing air of Nod

Have carried honest words of Eve to rock-deaf ears of God.

Jack Falstaff is a citizen and denizen

Of planet Nod who breaks the rules of gentlemen:

Far fallen, he descends to ‘rhymes’ that grate the ears of climes and times,

Matching denizen with gentlemen and genuine and gelatin.

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Planet Nod is planet Earth.

And yet, this spinning sphere gave birth

To kindness, love, and other goods that bless terrestrial neighbourhoods

With inklings of Eden and measures of mirth.

Perhaps Eve gave Jehovah such an angry human face

When making God in likeness of the all-too-human race.

Did God make Eve? Or Eve make God? When writing in her Book

About the God who floats the Earth on time’s still-streaming brook,

Reflecting on its surface every troubled human face

Of chagrined souls reflecting on the all-too-human race.

In Genesis, Eve writes of nights

Before the Boss turned on the lights.

In darkest deeps, Jehovah sleeps

Through earnest earthlings’ sacred rites.

And Pan’s the god of music: Playing melodies the Book

The Song of Solomon contains in language that the brook

Of time is singing, rippling over pebbles. And, its face

Brings brightness to their colours where the time and water race

Toward the singing symphonies in Shakespeare’s newest book

Of plays that play with language lively as the racing brook.

Will Shakespeare’s plays

Limn tragic days

Of Nod by other names, where gods with other aims

Survey, replay, betray.

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Mythologies, portraying gods,

Disclose their ways as cruel as Nod’s.

Though God’s concealed, truth’s revealed

In stories of those brutes and bawds.

Though God’s concealed, Eve’s revealed truths between the lines

That she has written in her Book mythology defines

As stories that reveal truths in dark, symbolic ways:

The darkness indirectly seen. Where stars are shining rays

Of truth that’s written in the words that hide between the lines

That set the terms of human life the word of God defines.

The darkness indirectly seen

Between the stars above the green

And verdant Paradise is icy as the price

That Eve will pay for ‘sin’ soon seen.

And Pan’s the god of lechery: He’s lustful as the ways

Of satyrs eyeing nymphs beneath the eye of heaven’s rays.

And Pan’s the god whose errant ways are limned in lusty lines:

Erotic verse Will Shakespeare’s pen designs, refines, defines.

And Jack’s designs on nymphs define the essence of his ways,

Refined to art by melodies the seraphs’ voices raise.

For Yahweh sees the ways of man and ways of woman too.

(S)He knows that Nod’s the land where Eve and Adam soon will do

“The act of darkness”: Lear’s foul phrase. There’s nothing foul about the ways

And means of earthy scenes that populate Earth’s stage anew.

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John Milton tried to justify the ways of God to man.

Eve was too sensible to try. And every fan

Of Shakespeare sees that: God is odd. And Fate, sometimes, a malicious bawd

With a contagious flourish of strumpets and a hidden plan.

Eve wrote her Book to help her readers understand the ways

Of God and of humanity. We fathom depths of plays

By Shakespeare when we comprehend how Will reveals souls

Within his scenes and verses. They create the storied roles

Of people ruled by fickle gods who understand the ways

Of characters who blunder through their tragicomic plays.

Eve wrote the first of the Books in the Bible:

Those ancient Books about the tribal

Deeds and thinking of God. And claims about the odd

Ways of tribes those thirty-nine Books libel.

The harmonies of melodies ascend to sainted souls

Who loved the Earth near Stratford, where the upland downs-land rolls.

The rolling downs are trembling under blubber: Falstaff weighs

Much more than any heavy in Will Shakespeare’s history plays.

Jack Falstaff hopes to see the woodland sprites and meadow souls

Who haunt the mossy glen where Pan, midst nymphs and lilies, rolls.

And Eve wrote many limericks

About the lot of Janes and Dicks

Who seek enchantments of the sprites in downland days and woodland nights,

Until the Moirae snuff their wicks.

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Upon a limb within a tree Eve limns in Genesis,

She hears the soft sibilant and shibilant sounds of a hiss.

The serpent says the maze will lead to better days

Than ignorance in Paradise. “The ignorance of this.”

The gods enjoy Will’s dramas: People muddle through a maze

Confusing to the characters. They search within their plays

That tell us much the same as Eve conveyed in Genesis:

That people live their lives in fear of pain, and hope of bliss.

We try to find the heart of things when muddling through a maze;

A mirror of the characters who bumble through those plays.

“The ignorance of living in a maze

That winds among the trees of Eden where a Pan-pipe plays

A melody that lulls the soul: That dulls the mind that pays the toll

Where bliss is ignorance. And the cost? Perpetual toddler-days.”

Jack’s rambling through the meadows, near the trees from Genesis.

They’re bringing living memories of distant pain or bliss.

A breeze is softly sighing in the green and living maze

Between the rows of trees of life, where dancing dappling plays.

Jack Falstaff walks the baffling maze, like Eve in Genesis.

And when they can’t discern the way, they summon thoughts of bliss.

And rambling through the Eden hours

Of Eden bowers and Eden flowers,

Eve feels flawless endless sun. And wonders if it might be fun

To say, “So what?” to pesky showers.

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Eve can picture a rainbow,

When tints and tones of colour owe

Their beauty to the Olympic deities. The gods ordain what they damn well please:

That Eve will paint, with lustrous words, their dazzling realm of rainbow, sun, and snow.

And so we ponder Genesis, where language-music plays.

We read what Eve has written of the rainy, sunny days.

She wrote of showers falling, before the fall of man,

And coloring the joyful span that’s known to every fan:

The brilliant bridge that gladdens those attending Shakespeare’s plays

When pristine light’s diffracted in the happy, sunny days.

Eve envisions rainbows: Stylus and papyrus are her things.

Ordained to be a writer, she describes the brook that sings

Its happy song in Paradise. It sings that songs could not suffice

To limn reflections of the woman where the fount-of-futures springs.

The lady Eve portrays her Eden, strolling with her man

In gardens where the zephyrs in the heart-shaped foliage fan

The leaves with veins like threads of blood: The threads that flow through plays;

The warmth and life of storylines that run through happy days.

For all the world’s a stage: One hopes the life of every man

And woman’s warmed by happy scenes the playful zephyrs fan.

The heart-shaped leaves of knowledge-trees

Attract Eve’s eyes. The lady sees

A promise that emotions and the mind will search together: Seek to find

The rainbow tinting the golden apples in the far Hesperides.

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The sock, or the buskin, are the shoes

That tell the world about happiness, or blues.

The sock: The shoe of Paradise its creator wore when making nice,

And leaving vanished tracks of Yahweh in the dawning’s morning dew.

The rainbow’s bow is arching over Shakespeare’s comedies.

And Eve described such bliss, and woe, on bark of knowledge-trees:

The happiness in Eden, and the suffering in Nod,

When writing of the shoes with which humanity is shod.

The sock, and not the buskin, shines the boards in comedies

Where pristine light is shining on the fruit of knowledge-trees.

The buskin is the shoe that God

Was wearing when (S)He sent to Nod

The couple who must breath the ashen dust

From paths of cinders they trod unshod.

Nostalgic Jack remembers days when ferns and flowers nod

On drowsy afternoons as children run through gardens; shod

With shoes they shed, to feel grass as green as comedies:

For greens are tints of life, and hues of Eden’s verdant trees.

Those children know the innocence and happiness that Nod

Has never hurt, like ponies heartless steel’s never shod.

A lion tried to do Adam in.

The lion’s out of lion-skin.

The lion that has vainly tried to gobble Adam now is hide

In Nod that’s shod the feet within.

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In Eden, lawns of gentle grass

Coddled the feet of lad and lass.

And the blossom-perfumed air blessed and caressed the happy pair

Who thought that Eden mirrored God: A living looking-glass.

The dancing shoes are leaping on the feet of happy souls

Who celebrate the work in life the joy in life consoles.

And play, upon a silver fife, a tune in praise of sylvan life

In Eden glades, when Yahweh slept, and Adam knew his wife.

For he knew Eve, and both knew love as new as happy soles

That never trudged on broken dreams the joy in life consoles.

In Nod, the heat of sun-scorched sand

Burned the feet that God’s command

Forced to walk on paths of pain that seared their routes through heart and brain.

And marked, like Cain, the seared, scarred land.

That innocence has vanished: Jack reflects on adult life;

The arrant knave is warming sheets with Pistol’s errant wife.

And ‘arrant knaves’, as Hamlet says, are crawling, creeping souls

Between the earth and heaven. Only Heaven-hope consoles,

With fleeting solace, Falstaff when he lusts for lasting life,

Yet knows mortality will take eternity to wife.

Between the heavens and the earth,

Between Eden’s full bounty and Nod’s fell dearth,

Eve and Adam walked through the gate, upon the path that led them straight

To winding, wounding ways of death and birth.

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Their liberty of thought in Nod

Is irritating thoughtless God.

(S)He doesn’t want her serfs to think about the invisible ink

Condemning sole-torn souls to plod unshod.

Eve’s language leaps to laud a land that’s freed of need to work.

And Adam ponders love and thought that clarify the murk:

For ignorance has vanished. Though the warmth of lambent light

Was shining on the bodies that the happy souls unite

In Eden’s perfect paradise that’s free of need and work,

Their liberty of thought in Nod enlightens gloom and murk.

So God decides to turn thoughts and thought

Toward limericks that Yahweh’s wrought.

“Hey Adam,” says the Jehovah, “like a brilliant supernova,

My dazzling blazing mind’s begot.”

Jack Falstaff doesn’t really think that Heaven’s blessèd light

Will shine through all eternity, as happy souls unite

In lauding Yahweh. There’s a chance that prayer and praise will work?

That kudos to the Boss will banish endless gloom and murk

Enveloping the soul in night? No silver ray of light

Brings consciousness to endlessness, when Jack and zilch unite.

“Begot a what?

And what’s a begot? Eve’s Book has got a lot.”

Says puzzled Adam. “A road’s a macadam.

But a MacAdam is a son of Adam. So what’s the word, Biggest Shot?”

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“Two words. The Storm:

A script my mighty mind will form.

Or maybe The Monsoon, or maybe The Typhoon,

Is a better name for my new art-form.”

Then stinging sweat is falling to the always-flowing brook,

And blurring lines of vision, and the lines within a Book.

The sweat obscures the nuggets of the glistening, gleaming gold

The stream of time glides over. As her Eden-song foretold,

The sweat of Nod is mingling with the one-way flowing brook

Reflecting words: The genesis of Eve’s poetic Book.

“Hey, Jehovah, what have you invented?

And, what’s with this wind Aeolus vented?

This tempest, by another name, when ham-bone characters declaim

The god of the winds must be demented.”

Jack doesn’t want to pray a ray of Heaven’s holy gold

Will gild his soul with sanctity. An oracle foretold;

At Delphi where the babbling of a Grecian mountain-brook

Was burbling words the priestess read in nature’s holy book;

That Falstaff’s fun would find an end if purifying gold

Seduced his soul to sanctify, as pessimists foretold.

“Hey Adam,” says the God of all

The world lamenting Adam’s fall,

“I’ve invented immorality plays, performed on holy days of praise,

And on this spinning, sinning ball.”

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“A ball? Not flat: A key to Earth’s geology.

Then Eve should change the cosmology

In Genesis. Or else she’ll miss

The mark with her teleology and theology.”

The shoes of Eve are earthbound, as she plods the pebbly ways

Of daily life, where little stones betoken care that weighs

Her soul with little troubles that her life and living bring:

Like noticing that ‘ways’ and ‘weighs’ are words that cannot sing

Duets, because they sound no rhymes at ends of pebbly ways

Now walked upon by sole-sore souls the hand of Yahweh weighs.

“You tell Eve. Then she’ll be learnèd.

She’ll know the Earth’s a ball that’s turned and turnèd

By my decree. And Eve will be

Aware of truths that Friar Lawrence has discernèd.

And saint-seducing gold has served, in R&J, to bring

A girl to listen to the tune that Romeo will sing

About the heavy sorrow that unanswered loving weighs:

A homonym. Another one? That other one is ‘ways’.

And saint-seducing golden birds on gilded coins will bring

The Governors, in Stratford town, to hear the loonies sing.

“In my other play, Friar Lawrence is a decent guy

Whose knowledge holds up half the sky.

The other half is held on high by kindly souls who bravely try

To soothe the spirit’s silent cry.”

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Jehovah looks at arid Nod. “A cry of pain.

A cry the gentle fall of autumn rain

Will silence when it brings the seeds to germinate and meet the needs

Of this stony land that I will give to Cain.

The pebbly paths of straight-out lines are formed of coloured stones:

The words that paint the spectrum as the silent voice intones

Duets: The couplets coupling lines in complementary bliss

Because they rhyme, so every time the first and second kiss;

When lines are formed of words that sport the hues of coloured stones

That lend their tones to silent words a thinking reed intones.

“The words as silent as the swans

That greet the gold and crimson dawns

With soundless songs about the wrongs

The devil-fish of Kismet spawns.”

The call of loons is haunting when the soul’s suffused with bliss

That comes of watching Luna rise, as light and water kiss.

When waves are lapping gently on the lake-cool moon-bright stones,

All Eden listens lovingly to sounds the breeze intones:

Monastic chants the spirit hears when encompassing bliss

Descends from all the universe, as night and starlight kiss.

“Hey Boss, the loss of Eden leaves me grievin’.

And hurtin’ songs recount the wrongs

That you’ve inflicted: And Eve’s depicted

In the Book she wrote about the boat.

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“Our boat upon the stream of time,

Described in verses lacking rhyme

In Genesis. And now we miss

The streams of Eden-air the black swans climb.”

Eve’s thoughts were light as wisps of cloud that traveled through the blue

Of Eden skies, where ivorybills and ivory angels flew.

No troubles weighed on Eve, as she traversed the Garden’s ways

Where flowers brushed her tickled legs. And caught the happy gaze

Of Eve, who picked the azure bells when roaming through the blue

Of meadows where the meadowlarks and meadow mornings flew.

The swans can hear the angels sing

About symphonic bells that ring

Their music over Eden’s streams. They’re chiming Eve’s and Adam’s dreams

And hopes the stream of time will sooth the sting.

A loon is on the wing above the silver-water ways

Diana offers, as a gift, to Eve’s enchanted gaze.

Diana is the goddess of the moon; and of the blue

And lucent pool where fifty hunting dogs in frenzy flew

At Actaeon, and tore him into pieces: Godly ways

Are dangerous to mortals who will not avert their gaze.

The stream of time should run as clear

As music in the silver sphere

Of Heaven’s heights and God’s delights,

So far from Nod and pain and fear.

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Eve doesn’t fall on meadow rue.

Yet comes to rue the meadow dew

That marks the passing of the Boss: The tracks, on morning-meadow’s moss,

Left by the clay feet of the deity who bends the yew.

In Nod, Eve’s troubles weigh her down, when walking on the ways

Where nettles sting her passing legs. And catch the passing gaze

Of God, who shrugs. Or would, if (S)He had shoulders and had arms

To raise in Godly disregard as (S)He regards the harms

Befalling Eve, who never falls when walking on the ways

Where meadow rue, and fescue too, attract her passing gaze.

(S)He bends the yew to launch a bolt

Of lightening when Adam and Eve revolt.

And Falstaff, reading Genesis, can almost hear the serpent hiss.

And see the ‘enameled skin, weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in’, that serpents molt.

Jack’s gaze returns to countryside. The broken oaken arms

Of toppled trees remind him of the violence that harms

Their human prey when dogs of war are tearing flesh. It weighs

So little in the scales when the eyes of tyrants gaze

At people who’ve been tortured: Victims’ broken human arms

And spirits make those autocrats exult in crimes and harms.

Jehovah holds a mighty bow

That (S)He could use to end the flow

Of acid that the tyrants’ hands are pouring on the ill-used sands

Where the Red Sea’s and Dead Sea’s thorn-trees of suffering grow.
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But Yahweh doesn’t do a thing.

(S)He lets the knells of dead hopes ring.

God lets the burning sands that greet the morning, and the mourning, meet

The feet, of Eve, the nettles sting.

She’s agile, nimble, careful. Yet, she lets the nettles sting:

Reminders of the pain that Cain inflicted with his sling

Before he slew his brother with the jawbone of a mule.

And Abel was the victim. But it’s Cain who was the fool,

Dispersing seeds of fury through this world where nettles sting;

And Fortune is outrageous, armed with arrows, bow, and sling.

In Genesis, Jack Falstaff sees reflections of the pain

Descending on the human race, like Portia’s acid rain.

It falls on Shylock, burning him, as jackals prowl and bigots grin,

And acid scars the human stain.

In Henry Fourth Jack Falstaff owns a stubborn star-crossed mule,

And donkey with a back-crossed mark of suffering. A fool

In human eyes, though not in God’s, experienced the sting

And arrow that the arms and barbs of brutes and bullies sling

To pierce the flesh and spirit. The star upon the mule

Throws light on palms and psalms that met a donkey and his fool.

In Genesis, when Adam names

The animals, he thinks of games

Of pin the tails on the burros: From Adam’s brow, and pensive furrows,

His choice of “donkey” lays its claims.

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The wailing wall has seen the fall

Of many arrant knaves who crawl

Between the heavens and the earth. And falling off that wall gives birth

To death for some and pain for all.

The nettles grow among the stones, where many people fall

When stumbling hard by Yahweh’s hope-born, time-worn, wailing wall:

Unfeeling stones that stub the toes, and bruise the bleeding shins

Of people bearing weighty woes, despite their lightweight sins.

For Eden’s not the only place where harmless people fall,

Like Humpty Dumpty, muscled off Jehovah’s wailing wall.

Another wall surrounds, and rounds,

Paradise. And Eden’s bounds

Are just the other side of stones that skin the hands, and break the bones:

The fractures pain, like loss, compounds.

A holy fool of God, with bleeding back and hands and shins,

Was hurt by kicks of Fortune and of men. He took the sins

Of humankind upon himself? And thus redeemed the fall

That places us forever outside Eden’s circling wall.

But Eve and Adam didn’t fall: That’s God. (S)He kicked their shins

By booting them from Paradise for non-existent sins.

And Adam said to Yahweh, “You’re a bully and a brute.

You forced us out of Eden, when we ate the crimson fruit

Of understanding pain; the stinging acid rain

That burns the branch and rots the root.

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“And Eve and I gaze at the stream

Of time, and see the future teem

With pain that pierces innocence. So who and what and whence

Art thou, Yahweh, that thou seem?

Those lines were not a reference to the troubled Middle East?

Where tragedies bring poisoned lamb of Yahweh to the feast.

Where all should share abundance that the mighty hand of God

Has planted in an Eden human deeds have turned to Nod:

God’s comedy made tragedy that bleeds the Middle East,

And turns the wine to water that is poisoned at the feast.

“That you seem indifferent

To pain and loss that life has sent

To children who endure the reign: The rule of unrelenting pain

That hurts and harms the innocent?

Jack sees the meadow-morning’s minion, falcon bred by God,

Ascending in the mind and wind, to hover over Nod:

A kestrel, in a famous poem, took flight in light the east

Gave day-dawn birth; a golden sky where eye and thinking feast.

And in the morning, meadow mice fear fates ordained by God,

When claws and beak will rend their nerves on bitter herbs of Nod.

“Upon the surface of the brook

Of time we see an open book:

The pages turn from year to year, without relief from pains that sear

The people caught upon the hook.

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“The hook you dangle from the sky,

To catch the flesh of those who cry

In pain: A cry that’s hushed when time’s harsh heel has crushed

The days and years that slowly fly.

Will Shakespeare, in his tragedies, as in his comedies,

Is spinning language webs from threads of storied lines that please.

The storylines of Hamlet, Lear, and Macker’s Scottish play

Are stained with death and suffering that Shakespeare’s words allay

With language that’s as welcome as the fun in comedies

Where lines of speech are woven into tapestries that please.

“The time that circles round the room

Where suffering’s born of the tomb:

The grave of time, and womb of pain. And will they never come again;

The roses that the jaws of life consume?

The kestrel bred by nature’s God; the God of nature’s play:

For all the world’s a stage where nature’s works of art allay

Unhappiness and suffering. And mingling comedies

With tragedies and histories, Jehovah tries to please

The fickle watchers of the show, when light and darkness play

On “dapple-dawn-drawn” falcons and the sorrows they allay.

“The days of wine and roses

That the emptiness encloses:

The darkness that has come before. And darkness that remains in store,

Which time, in paradox, discloses.

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“For time will bring eternity.

And days won’t fly, and years won’t flee:

No wings of time above the sea that waits for Eve and waits for me,

And drowns reflections of the tree.

The pain, the fun; the life, the death; and all those rights and wrongs

Bestow on fans the magic of his yarns that tell us truths

Will sets to music: Compositions pleasing to the sleuths

Detecting, in symphonic sound, the meanings in the songs:

The language, that narrates to us those ageless rights and wrongs

Anne Hathaway has set to music singing wordless truths.

“The tree of knowledge of the days

We lived beneath the silver gaze

Of Luna, looking on the race: The people run. The Furies chase.

Yet people build cathedrals eons raze.

The FBI and CSIS, and a throng of other sleuths,

Are trying to detect the reason cockamamie songs

Have rhymes that violate the rules. Such wretched rhyming wrongs

The eyes and ears of readers: They have gazed at deep-down truths

That Father Hopkins clothed in language understood by sleuths

Examining the bone beneath the flesh of lyric songs.

“Cathedrals that contain the glory

Of light and glass. They tell the story

Of Isaac and of Abraham: That guy who killed a thorn-torn ram,

Instead of Fortune’s human quarry.

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“A ram that suffered as it died.

And a boy afraid, when angels cried

Because Jehovah wanted death to spurt the blood and stop the breath,

And float the spirit on the tide.

And up above? The verse reversed: The scribbler got it wrong.

On paths of verse, a singer sometimes stumbles in the song

That people greet. As some salute companions on the path

Through woodlands where they prize the fall. Then laugh at winter’s wrath,

Until we’ve warmed the wintertime; because we got it wrong,

And brought discordant dissonance to Nature’s complex song.

“The tide that ebbs toward the sea

That drowns the spirit not to be.

Then Eden’s lost, and Nod is too. And yet it’s true the spirit knew

The fruit upon the knowledge-tree.

The lyre bird is singing of the straight and narrow path

Jack Falstaff ought to walk along, avoiding lyric wrath

Intoned in King Jim’s Bible. Falstaff wanders down the wrong

And primrose-petalled path. And listens to the lyre-song

Ophelia was warbling as she walked a thorn-thronged path:

A testament to madness, and to bitter grapes of wrath.

“The pomegranates filled with seeds

Of knowledge of the words and deeds

Of people who have screwed it up, and gods who drank the amber cup

Of mead on dawning’s dew-drop meads.

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“The meadows like the clearing

In Eden: Flowering flocks of phlox are wearing

The sparkling jewels of dew-drops worn by flowers that adorn the morn:

That’s ‘morning’, when the birds are airing.

In fall, we fall for beauty that adorns the maple leaves;

In love with all the beauties that the hand of Nature weaves.

Jack Falstaff falls the hardest, for he weighs the most of all,

Then lands upon a stack of leaves that breaks his breakneck fall;

Because he is a patriot, he lands on maple leaves.

Then fibs about the beauties that the tongue of Falstaff weaves.

“They’re airing morning melodies

Upon the currents of the breeze

Caressing, blessing Eden’s flowers when songbird song, and sunshine, showers

The brilliant beauty Adam sees.

The lyric wrath’s in music that the Bible sings to all

Who read its language-melodies about the spring and fall:

The springtime of the pristine world, when heart-shaped knowledge-leaves

Bear images of tapestries that Mother Nature weaves.

And Eden-autumn presaging a windy winter: All

Of Yahweh’s icy anger’s felt at Eve’s and Adam’s fall.

“That’s me. That’s I, to be pedantic.

I watch each ant that’s playing antic

Games between the jobs she does. When hepped-up bees enjoy the buzz,

And games are ludic or semantic.

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“Semantic games that play with speech:

The realm of thought exceeds the reach

Of people who believe that words are merely goads to prod the herds

To stay in line, or storm the breach.

Like Adam, Jack’s a fallen man. But not expelled to Nod,

For angels catch that falling man, on orders from their God.

Jack always lands upon his feet: He lives a comedy

Where happy endings end his songs upon a carefree key;

In contrast to the dirges keened by Eve, expelled to Nod,

When angels brandished flaming swords, on orders from their God.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends!

Until the toll of warfare ends

Your lives, and turns the Earth to Nod. And thus the goads of power prod

The flesh the blade of blood-lust rends.

The Book of Genesis, like Lear, is not a comedy

Containing puns about the lock that fits and suits the key.

No verses josh about the Boss who nods and nods in Nod:

(S)He’s bushed from spinning galaxies; the endless task of God.

Yet God enjoys the raucous songs of Aussie comedy,

About the waltzing lyre birds, Matilda sings off-key.

“In Genesis, God makes the Earth.

In Henry Fifth, the death, and dearth

Of decency, will soak the earth with seeds-of-blood that seed the birth

Of plants in mud and pain in mirth.

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“The grapes of wrath were planted in the barren land of Nod

By Yahweh when (S)He played the role of mighty, angry God.

In Henry Fifth, the role of God is played off-stage. It’s very odd

Jehovah’s content to take the part of Henry’s useful bawd.

When Eve and Adam fled to Nod, upon their judgement day,

They drank the sour wine produced when grapes of wrath decay.

The music-words intoxicate, like cheery cherry wines:

The words of Will, that give to Jack his sunny, funny lines.

And Jack will enter Paradise upon his judgement day,

And drink the wines that never make sagacity decay.

The words of Yahweh give the ruler power Henry craves:

The lust for domination that sends gulls and dupes to graves

So shallow in the soil that the claws and canines toil

Very briefly for the meals made of varlets, kerns, and knaves.

Those wines are metaphoric: Jack’s euphoric when the wines

Of Shakespeare’s music fill the cups inscribed with Shakespeare’s lines.

But when the wines are literal, on Satan’s judgement day,

The alcohol will feed the flames as trust and hope decay.

And giggling imps and implettes, getting pissed on Hades’ wines,

Will read the hacks’ and hacklettes’ hottest pornographic lines.

“And Agincourt is worse than Nod:

At least on land decreed by God

To be the source of pain and grief for those who dared to buck the Chief,

Just one man’s blood has soaked the sod.

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Of the twelve books Michael Shea has written:

How many pages are in each book?

And how many pages are on this website?

The Allegro Quartet

The Judgement of Solomon -- 403 pages -- Forty pages

Eden Lost -- 338 pages -- Thirty-three pages

The Silver Apples of the Moon -- 334 pages -- Thirty-three pages

The Blue Star of Twilight -- 361 pages -- Thirty-six pages

The Adagio Quartet

The Sable Swans -- 366 pages – Thirty-seven pages

The Willows of the Brook -- 350 pages – Thirty-five pages

The Field of the Lilies -- 364 pages – Thirty-six pages

The Noontide Sun -- 326 pages – Thirty-two pages

The Andante Quartet

The Pine and Cedar -- 299 pages – Thirty pages

This Rough Magic -- 377 pages – Thirty-seven pages

The Mountain Nymph -- 394 pages – Thirty-eight pages

The Seeds of Time -- 333 pages – Thirty-four pages

The excerpts can be read, free of any fee, on the author’s website:

MichaelShea12books.com

Thank you for reading excerpts from the books.

If you wish to read the books in their entirety, each is, or will be, available.

They are published by ( ).

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The twelve books are dedicated to my daughter, Marie-Laure,

and to my brothers, Philip and Gerald.

I completed the books in the following years:

The Judgement of Solomon - 2010

Eden Lost - 2011

The Silver Apples of the Moon - 2012

The Blue Star of Twilight - 2012

The Sable Swans - 2013

The Willows of the Brook - 2013

The Field of the Lilies - 2014

The Noontide Sun - 2015

The Pine and Cedar - 2015

This Rough Magic - 2016

The Mountain Nymph - 2016

The Seeds of Time - 2017

Thank you for reading this selection from Eden Lost.

To read the remaining pages of Eden Lost, please buy the book.

From my office, looking through the window at my apple tree and the cedars and maples,

best wishes from Michael Shea.

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