• My grandmother painted naked
• Adam and Eve: plans for a stained
• glass window. Days when sun illuminated
• their bodies I studied

• Eve's curving apples, and the curious
• fruit of Adam's anatomy. My own
• lean landscape green, unripe, still
• unyielding of its secrets.

• Nudes I sketched in college still live
• under newsprint leaves, a charcoal harvest,
• abundance hidden in folios.
• And that summer in Oslo,

• when I stood transfixed
• before The Kiss: two lovers, limbs
• entangled like the leafless male and female
• kiwis snaking around my door:

• each entwined line etched
• into copper, each body rubbed with ink
• and pressed onto Fabriano cotton.
• Child of mine, what work of art

• will you steal away with,
• sequestered with its sexual canvas?
• I see you, mesmerized by a rising brushstroke
• of thigh, fleshy apple breast,

• a torso's raised relief–
• this is the page the book remembers,
• the print hidden behind my mirror.
• You are budding

• under a meadow of skin, fresh
• clay cast into slopes and valleys.
• Untouched linen, tree of secrets,
• rib of new fruit–

• who will draw you when you ripen?

Ronda Broatch