How to write of paradise, Its symmetrical pathways Were Adam and Eve bored? pleasure from pleasure Can a life thrive a poem, even a word? before their eyes were opened, prefer not to see? without somewhere a shadow; a chaos. Contradiction Under clod and pebble, And another version Paradise? Not really. but an aperture of time. on the river. Still, in the mind And in the world, there is a betrayal, Richard Brostoff’s work has appeared in Rattle, Texas Review, Atlanta Review, Epiphany, Gulf Stream, The Anthology of New England Writers, Confrontation, South Dakota Review, River Oak Review, The Distillery, Owen Wister Review, Contact Quarterly, Hawaii Pacific Review, Cumberland Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Wisconsin Review, Eclipse, Red Wheelbarrow, Southeast Review, Willow Review, Whiskey Island, Magma (London), Verse Daily, and many other journals. He won the grand prize at the AEI International Poetry Festival, the editor’s choice for the Robert Penn Warren Award, and was a finalist for the Iowa Review Poetry Contest. My chapbook, “Momentum,” was published by La Vita Poetica (Atlanta, Georgia, 2007). A second chapbook, “A Few Forms Of Love” was published by Finishing Line Press (2012). He has been part of the dance world for a number of years now, and perform new dance and contact improvisation. He is also a physician and studied medicine at Duke and Harvard.
The Trouble with No Trouble
that too perfect garden?
and untroubled light.
Can joy come of nothing,
without knowing pain?
without tensions,
In the beginning,
did the first couple
In Eden no light shined
no calm came without first
simmered under the stones.
a welter, a worm.
of the story.
Not a fixed place
A transient gleam
A wink in the story.
there is always a garden.
always some trouble,
someone’s pain––
We seed
our own fall.
A snake will lie waiting.
He is part of the deal.About the Author
