Rahab

The once wild river is tamed

Cherishing trees instead of drowning them.

            Horace The Art of Poetry

It would be too complacent to build a nest

between one's fatalism and one's pleasures.

            Robert Pinsky  An Explanation of America

Oleanders bend like willows; the hopping thrush

dodges waves to reproduce amidst the flood;

the kingfisher, his turquoise crest erect,

scans the water for darting minnows,

but black, the water, is too deep and still

swirling with leaves and twigs.

Examining the turtle dove, smoothing gray

on flat stone, she sang briefly, now longer,

so long that she mistook for stability, the umbrellaed

acacias scarred in river's torrent, their leaves and

spines drawn inward like hooking fingers

clutching the back of her arms.

The kingfisher dropped to reeds and

swayed impatient in the heaving;

A sun bird in clustered red over emerald

and irridescent purple on the black of his breast

perched in the accacia, and her eyes scanned

the amphitheatered valley.

Moabite plain root and balsam wood,

too soft to burn, she was not like the stalks of flax

dried to fuel the belly of the cooking pot.

The gray turtle dove, her eye blinking white,

picked golden stalks, slender, elegant, useful, then

lifting soundlessly, flew

over and through the sun, bronzed and pedestaled

on the cold green arms of acacias to sink so near the swollen beach.

She followed the bird, her arms aching to lift,

to wreathe shafts into that woven mesh of gold, to nest.

This season weathers storm and flood,

and worshipping saplings bend great sighs of praise

to the bloated Jordan, whose orgying, and moaning

toils water that is alive and bulges into the rolling veins

of desert and women,

rushing, a beast to besiege the moon, that hangs

just  above the horizon, faint in the blooming day,

a wet dog looming heat.

Treasure, in the lapping up of red and gold,

in the sucking of new rain, in the scrounging

through wet clothes, conquered disdain.

Each time, her song floated and fell, the weaving

harmony unwrapping itself, its play of words

and sound coaxed from pleasure and goaded into grief.

This time, this visitation, this round of dance

and song in lithe turning, required another kind

of sacrifice, no contortions of will and emotions,

no spectacle of desire tainted with greed or lust.

There was no taunting, or accusation in these

two men, strangers, their fingers not hooked,

not fishing,

not shrinking in for lust or wine or lips or backs of arms

or black breasts,

no true confessors whose bones were hardened in words of comfort

and kinship

and payment.

Surreptitiously, they came, their eyes coating

white like cautious doves;

she knew them; she did not know them.

She laid them under her dried flax as rain came,

in fine mist and the ache of flesh on bone that deepens

in moisture and the smell of that great plain steeped in

mud and river, driving all but the hardiest away up into the city

and the mountains and the sky.

She heard the kingfisher calling, a shrill echo,

tenacious as the tuber waiting for spring,

a torment that loathed the fragrant pulse and breath

of acacia’s furred stamens.

In rescue and betrayal, of conflict and trust,

Her breath sapping in violent beating and pulsing gain,

her heart torn between loyalty and retribution,

she perceived the promise, so elegant and

tiny like the delicate flowers

of acacia, adorning the nest..

In relinquishment, there was release

of new song and new word in new emblem

of weft and light; the nest, enwrapping gold and green,

gleamed near the mouth of the raging Jordan,

on the plain of Jericho.  On the lips of strangers,

new rhythms cadenced the call of kingfishers

and sequenced the unknown melody.

When the townsmen came looking for spies,

she turned them away with lies and suggestion;

then quietly, with confidence and abandon, she

uncovered the nest birthed under flax

and tied the scarlet cord.