Lot’s Wife
It was a cold spring, like an epiphany
bludgeoned.
Threadbare, a land without violet irises
to suture the whine of dust.
to suture the whine of dust.
O, this country, this nacred
slaughterhouse—our fates
slaughterhouse—our fates
were a plowed migration route,
a tangle of grapevine.
a tangle of grapevine.
The seraphs’ catalyst: only my husband
would give the newcomers
would give the newcomers
what was deserved: a cooked meal,
a place to pose weary heads. The rest
a place to pose weary heads. The rest
would aim to own them,
distilling each body
distilling each body
to a convenient use. Use, this country’s
tungsten covenant,
tungsten covenant,
what the generations, fungal, fruit,
breaking flesh
breaking flesh
down to blooded colony.
We too were called strangers here,
We too were called strangers here,
had learned this.
What is left to say, then,
What is left to say, then,
when a distant maker rears
to gash the fields with sulfur,
to gash the fields with sulfur,
& the red sun rolls
to close its wings,
to close its wings,
& horizon mutates
into a crust of flies, the sky
into a crust of flies, the sky
a woozy lantern,
an inferno rain, a reckoning?—
an inferno rain, a reckoning?—
|
Wait. Let me begin again.
I turned— I couldn’t stop me.
One could say because I had no other origin,
my mother no other tongue. Or I remembered how the river wrapped
my thighs like fresh silk, how my throat tensed to sob
when owlsong hauled dusk back
to the woods’ black branches. Or I thought of my children,
of my childhood, of how I had nowhere else to go
on this whole heartbroken earth, & perhaps that meant
there was some hard stone sharding in me too I was something
other, closer, than a brute beast’s whelp,
I was an avatar of my own enemy, its skin
was mine, & I was no python who could whip
my shape to shed it. |
|
Let me begin again. I was made, here,
an ancient woman: a body without a country,
a body without a body, the love in me a charred dahlia,
a salted field, my name kept hidden
from my face. I turned—
a peculiar triumph—as ruin
succumbed to the ruin it birthed, & our twin threads
whorled into one fray set to snap.
I was a rage, first, then I was clean
rapture, & the moon was falling over Sodom
like an ax. |
