Ariana Reines’s poem “CAIN” travels in couplets. Each line is like one foot, then another, falling onto the pavement of the city, and with each step, thought itself moves, then transforms. The easy way of seeing the world begins to look like a socially convenient illusion. In its place is something so shocking — and perhaps shockingly out of fashion — that it requires scare quotes. “The truth,” with all its ancient and uneasy heft, appears. Selected by Anne Boyer
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 murder 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
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.”
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