Eldest Daughter: Poems

Preacher’s Daughter

11 Preacher’s Daughter| i | What’s worse, she’s forgotten how to pay attention. Old King James thumps along to Judah’s soldier-boy march, and she hears footfalls in the dust beside the parade. Old Testament rhetoric cracks out of Sinai, echoes off tablets of black granite. Ever obedient, she strains to understand, but she’s distracted by a mild chatter above the washing stones in the river. Soup for rangy teenage sons bubbles in clay pots. The evensong of weavers. Light fails. Children drop off to sleep. A soft pattern of threads spreads under playing fingers.| ii | In the beginning was the Word The Word was never spoken But other words were spoken about the Word, and these spoken Words were repeated and remembered and repeated again and became better with the retelling, and became so good that writing was invented and they were written down, and because these written words carried some measure of assurance, they were copied, and then copied again, and passed around, and then they were collected and then they were redacted, and codified and edited and translated, and used for selfish purposes and used for singing babies to sleep, 12 and then exegesis was devised to be performed on them, and then they were translated some more, and at last the printing press was invented for them and they were printed, and published, and marketed in every way marketing departments of publishing houses could concoct, and they were bound in different colors and illustrated and put to music, and great arguments were waged over every little jot and tittle, and brother turned against brother while sister turned her face away, and still the copying and the translating and the printing and the reprinting and the arguments went on but the Word was never spoken| iii | In the way that limestone erodes into the sea, leaving behind a bare granite headland to be named and charted, haunted by mermaids who sing to sailors, Come close, Come too close, so we speak words in answer to other words.| iv | Miriam’s role was to round up the slaves. They balked and moaned. Bondage was OK, they’d say, if you play your cards right. The order is set, they’d whine, caste decreed in the stars. How else to appease the great river, how else to petition for its overflow and fall? 13 The past is done, she’d slap that tambourine. Horse and rider, whack it again, Cast in the sea. Moses thought he deserved a splashier exit. Wanted some Emmy-class special effects. This delta mudsplatter on his shins and dirty bathrobe and sandals, small reward for facing down a Pharaoh. Horse and rider, Miriam sang. Cast in the sea. The Pharaoh’s daughter begged him to stay. All things return, Batya hummed, glittering lapis and gold, sandalwood to woo a lost baby: coil and recoil. This bumpkin god of the desert does not see. But leave he did, left inlaid flail and chariot and the chance to be god-king Osiris himself. Walked away, plague and mayhem bursting out on every side. Miriam got a few families to follow, the poorest, who could carry all they owned on their backs. And ahead of them, on the far shore, timbrel flashing, she danced to call them over. Horse and rider. Oldest couplet in scripture. Cast in the sea. When the dirty rabble faced into the desert, the youngest children heard a sound 14 their parents couldn’t name: Time, that seamless Egyptian circle, squalled on a brand-new hinge never wrung before. Swung open like a great round door, and something—maybe it was just them— moved forward! It did! Moved forward! And the history of the world quit going around in circles, and began.| v | What’s worse, she’s forgotten how to read. The holy letters wobble, then scramble to spell words she mustn’t ever say. At the piano, she flubs the hymns. Overtones of unintended pitch hum from chance nodes on the strings, unnerving little tunes, in minor keys. In her dreams, water drips chilly in the dissolving throats of deep caves. She sleeps afraid. They were there, insists the cool water in the caves: those ghosts you see, a limestone mold for magma that fills anything it can. White soft stone that bears the heat till the fierce basalt gains...