Ketuvah Sestina

Here's a poem I wrote about incarnation. It was originally published in The Dead Mule, but isn't there any longer. There's some great stuff there. Check it out!

Ketuvah[1] Sestina

Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity

-Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," 1860, v. 178.

So Moses took his wife and his sons, put them on a donkey and went back to the land of Egypt . . . . . . . On the way, at a place where they spent the night, YHWH met him and tried to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his feet with it, and said, “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!” So he let him alone. It was then she said, “A bridegroom of blood by circumcision.”

-Exod. 4:20, 24-26; NRSV, alt.

Tsípporah—so delicate a name
for a minister of blood: swallow,
or sparrow, like the bird of Isis, who fluttered over
the inarticulate parts of her son and lover’s
body, twittering them back into
one sublimely scarred, wounded, thus whole.

This one wields the knife herself—a whole
foreskin subtracted, confirming a name,
cut off, its unguent blood transformed into
a sign: Already offered, no need to swallow
him up, sliced in two, son and lover
here and beyond, the one who crosses over.

Good mothers make these cuts over
and over to save their sons, daughters, whole
peoples from the seductions of the dark lover,
Lord Thanatos, Kali—names
for the name-destroyer, the violent angel who would swallow
all things, retract the law-giver, lured back into

the void, before God’s word was spoken, into
the uncreated waters the Spirit hovers over.
Tsipporén means “point of a stylus”: the swallow’s
sharp beak, tearing the undifferentiated whole,
the tohu bohu—“Let there be light!”: A naming,
incisive and violent, traces of a rough lover.

Poets are brutes, intemperate lovers,
excited by the blankness of the page, into
which the hovering nib plunges—a name
carved there, the sheet ploughed over
like the furrows in Achilles’ shield, the whole
field made fertile by the inky seed it swallows.

Each laborious line yields fruit, a swallow
of wine, “This is my blood, my body,” the Lover
of our spirited bodies cries out, ecstatic, wholly
bent toward the body of His lover, the earth, into
whose sifting sand he writes—starts over—,
carving a space for the promiscuous body, a new name.

Saint Philip, exegetical lover
of scarred bodies, teach us to trace our names
along their cut lines into the whole!

[1] Hebr. fem pt. ptc. of ktv, “write,” “inscribe,” “engrave”; variant : ketuvim, “scripture”; Aram. fem. n.: “document,” especially a ceremonial marriage contract.