The Butcher of Eden

Now God made Adam and Eve coats of skins and dressed them.
– Genesis 3:21

And when he was finished,
he scraped fat
from the backs of stretched skins,
wiped the blood,
sewed the seams,
bit the thread with teeth
and said:
Dress yourselves in these.

And they said:
what is this verb?

God shoved his knife into the earth, and said:
It’s like make believe
but for your body.

They looked at all the meat
still steaming
from when it was alive.

God said: Eat.
And watched while
beasts of Eden fed
on beasts of Eden.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is one of 31 contemporary writers in Aaron Kent’s excellent, super-slim affordable anthology, Opening Line. The “opening line” of the poem contributed by Philip Gross, “This, in … I won’t say the heart – in the machinery of things …” seems like a good impressionistic summary of the books’s aesthetic, its machinery of things and its heart.

I chose Ó Tuama’s poem among the many I admired because one of my current interests is how contemporary and 20th-century poets deal with the Abrahamic religions, particularly Christianity – the questions, rebuffs and redefinitions. Partly agreeing with Philip Larkin that the Bible is “beautiful balls, but still balls”, I read the Old Testament not only as an epic poem but for some understanding of nationalism, racism, and religious conflict itself – all the basics of human brutality which still rampage over the Earth, fundamentally unchanged. God in the OT strikes me as an all-too-human dictator, a character made by humans in the image of an earthly tyrant. And sometimes, like them, he can be strangely attractive, almost vulnerable.

Ó Tuama’s poem exposes the falsity of an Eden without appetite, where lions don’t tear into lambs, and Adam and Eve rarely seem hungry before biting the infamous apple. At this point, as readers will remember, Adam and Eve realise they’re naked, and hastily cover themselves with fig-leaves. The animal skin coats God provides will last longer than the leaves, and keep the couple’s embarrassing secrets warmer and better concealed.

For many biblical commentators, as probably for the poet, God has killed the animal first (“And when he was finished …”) Armed with both knife and needle, after hunting down the animal, butchering it, cleaning the skin, cutting and stitching it, God completes his work as an old-fashioned mother might, biting off the remaining thread when the stitching is done – “with teeth”, Ó Tuama cunningly emphasises.

His swift account of the clothes-making is compellingly original. But the idea of the initial killing, offstage in both the Bible and the poem, isn’t new: it’s been assumed by many commentators, particularly by the Calvinists, in whose theory of penal substitutionary atonement an animal’s life has had to be sacrificed for the human miscreants to be forgiven. This reading, too, has been challenged. The writer Eitan Bar puts the emphasis on the word “made”. The “coats of skin” are created by God’s supernatural power; no animals are harmed. What’s more, since leather tunics were worn by the upper echelons of Hebrew society, Bar and others have concluded that the couple, in being dressed by God in leather tunics, were being ordained as priests. The transitive verb “dress” can mean to prepare, embellish or otherwise add the finishing touches to an object, a dead animal, a meal. “God … dressed them” in the English translation could even refer to the “dressing” of the skins, not the couple.

In the poem’s clearer, more familiar usage, God tells the couple: “Dress yourselves in these.” Puzzled, they have an immediate question, revealing them to be keen but still uncertain users of language: “And they said: / what is this verb?” The brisk dialogue thickens like a plot. God’s brutally careless gesture with the knife is accompanied by a delightful explanation of dressing: “It’s like make believe / but for your body.”

The couple are already distracted by the look and smell of “all the meat / still steaming / from when it was alive.” Ordered by God to eat, they do so, obedient and childlike again. It seems to be a first-time experience, and a mark of the couple’s new, fallen status, equalising them with the beasts of Eden and subject to the same difficult appetite for others of their kind.

Ó Tuama’s narrative is spare and exact, drawing unobtrusively on the biblical accumulative “and”: this conjunction begins the poem and is used a further four times. The device aids immediacy: the poem, with all its significant pauses and vocal nuance, seems to be over in a few flavoursome seconds.

As an interpretation of Genesis 3:21, The Butcher of Eden brings to the account of the Fall a modest re-positioning of humans in our ecosystem. What part the poem might play in the poet-theologian’s personal narrative can be gathered from his earlier collection, Feed the Beast. Here he challenges both the religious and medical establishments that inflicted repeated anti-gay “therapies” and three exorcisms on him as a younger man. His empowerment begins with the realisation that it is not against God to “feed the beast”; the hungry animal is no devil. In the anthology, the poem is independent of the context of abuse and self-torment. In its freshness and clarity of vision, it enacts an energising merging of identities among the beasts of Eden, perhaps including the beastly butcher, too.