Had Eve been aware of nuclear physics
she could have entered that apple's wormhole
emerged on the other side of light, Adam,
of course, following. And there would no longer
have been any Paradise to lose.

King Minos, had he read Hawking,
would have made yet another black hole,
named it the Minotaur without
all that messy bull and human business,
his sacrificial victims sucked at once in its maws.

Ariadne would have used up her string
in the usual manner, unless it became
cosmic superstring, pulling her into
its oscillations, perhaps to be plucked
like a violin string, more likely to drift
forever shaped like this rubberband
I snap with my fingers. . .

One snap and again I've proven
I can set a fence to enclose any scrap of land
as long as it‚s the past, call that land paradise,
plant it in my head one old garden after another.
When in a dream I imported to such a place
my very late grandma Annie and grandpa Joe
they begged I guide them to the exit gate
though the arrows were clearly marked
and I‚m sure they were not blind
given their stares at my clothes and hair
the way I‚d resurrected the trees and paths
that surrounded their long dismantled house.

Why did they want so badly to break from my dream?
If they‚ve found a superior paradise, wherever
their particles now joined the worldlines
of all who‚d ever lived, I wish them well. Still
I myself would have stayed, I who keep making these
paradise gardens, planting them inside my head,
unpruned, out of season, their borders merging to one
scraggly plot, their fruit never plucked, lest I enter
a wormhole, its other mouth opening into a time
so remote its light has long been extinguished.