The jars that I keep my questions in sit next to tubes of paint

Anxiety waits patiently, ready to be manifest in those minerals ground,

Just colored dirt

Suspended in oil the crushed rocks glisten and beckon

A canvas epic in scale sits on an easel paradoxically small and cloistered

It has edges, you see, to keep the picture inside

The fabric stretched is crisscrossed with threads of faith and feeling and fear

Connecting and separating

Warp and weft and waiting

I pick up the usual jar,

the one labeled “woman” in cursive script that I decorated with flowers when I was 8 years old, before I threw it against a mirror and broke it for the first time

I tip it over and its contents start to spill out in a swirl of color

Shifting and changing, forming images and shapes

Like chasing mercury from a broken thermometer

A child of the Enlightenment,

I want meaning and understanding, a clear path

But I keep finding beauty and mystery and contradictions

A picture forms, a woman beautiful

Waiting and wanting, still as glass

(Why are they always beautiful?)

The serpent tempted Eve with promises

“you can know” he whispers “you will understand”

The desire for beauty and sensation

Knowledge and sight, the fruit takes form

Delight to the eyes and good to eat

One bite of the poison apple and Snow White fell to the ground

She was beautiful too

The woman turns, arm outstretched, offering

he had the same want, her partner

 to know more and to be more, but we forget that

so he took, and ate

In one short verse,

In one moment

Sameness and unity disintegrate

And she is shoved from his side with a curse:

Bone of my bone flesh of my flesh becomes

“The woman you gave me”

Blame sticks to the skin and burrows under flesh

Shame born in the bone and somehow passed down

Dropped from the lips of defining/dismissing men

“you are, each of you, an Eve” said Tertullian

(The definition became important because of desire)

Beauty and sensation

The want embodied was a threat

So Persephone is consigned to Hades, and Cassandra cursed for declining

Cursed to know the truth, that no one believed

Susannah, Bathsheba, Venus each spied on in their bath

Are immortalized in stone and paint

Even goddesses are not exempt from appearing

Being seen and defined,

Becoming not their own.

But they are beautiful and that is the important thing.

The Woman learns to observe herself as Berger writes,

 born into the keeping of men.

Her ingenuity in that is necessary for flourishing

But what was a decision, became tradition and expectation

And yet.

The “object” turns and quietly regards,

the muse confronts with her own gaze, steadfast

Symbol and universal constant, each of them an Eve,

Her own beginning, the beginning of the world

Daphne flees soft skin becomes hard, growing in strength, and size

rooting in earth and reaching to the sky

Deborah prophesies, Esther, Jael and Judith take up jewels or arms to fight

And constant Ruth stays by her mother-in law’s side

Social constraint broken

Order defied by obedience and faith

Submission, but not to a man, (again we forget that part)

The movement of the Spirit

The seed of the woman

The blood of a virgin feeding the very Power that hung the stars

The Word that spoke, the Word that was spoken

The strength of a body flexible and lifegiving, expanding to contain the universe

the imminent frame pierced by transcendence

glimpses of the divine manifest

redefining, reclaiming

reshaping, renewing

I shake the jar again, reaching deep inside the concepts that have defined me

And curse under my breath, circling it for the umpteenth time

I can’t remove beauty no matter how hard I try

It sticks to the sides and pervades everything