CAIN

By Ariana Reines

The city was humming gently under me
Like an adolescent quaffing deeply
      from the cup of righteousness

Out of practice with my own world
I was looking at how someone else saw it

Longer than I realized
Longer than I care to admit

Those goggles left a mark on me
Then I stared at my own face

An invitation came with my face
To melancholy while Nature

Purred at the edges of my perception
And before me lay a broad road

Enjoining me to do of myself and make
Of myself according to the American

Tradition. Secretly I felt and knew
Things I had not perceived my body

Turning into secrets. In other words
I did not notice the mechanism

By which something within me noted
My experiences and apprehensions  of ‘the truth’

Would not be met with favor if I  spoke them
Which is not to say one speaks  only to find favor

Only that unreciprocated realities  have a boring
Way of haunting the cells

Pulling them somehow down
Like the countenance of Cain

Which fell one day and never rose
Again, and the fall of his face

Rhymed with the fall out of Eden
Leading to the first ******  and the invention

Of cities, where we now find ourselves
Each tower the ghost of a farmer

Who failed to meet the favor of the Lord


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Anne Boyer is a poet and an essayist. Her memoir about cancer and care, “The Undying,” won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Ariana Reines is a poet, a performing artist and a playwright from Salem, Mass. “A Sand Book” won the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She runs Invisible College, a study hall for poetry, sacred texts and the arts. This poem is from her next book, “The Rose.”