Heavenly Bodies

Bastard’s Song

3 Bastard’s Song Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. At birth, on the day you were born, there was no one to cut your umbilical cord or wash you in water to clean you, or rub you with salt, or wrap you in swaddling clothes. No one looked at you with kindness enough to do any of these things out of pity for you. You were dumped in the open fields in your own filth on the day of your birth. I spotted you kicking on the ground as I passed by, and I said to you, lying there in your blood: “Live!” And I made you grow like the grass of the fields. Ezekiel 16, 3–6 My mother was a Hittite and my father an Amorite. My foster uncle was an albatross and his brother-in-law ran a gambling joint in Altoona. My cousins were stockbrokers in Scottsdale before the crash. I was sold to strangers for a bag of wheat and wandered the roads and the mountain passes like a dark wind, touching and picking up whatever came into my hands. I will stay alone many days until I meet up once more with those men I knew in my youth: men from Syracuse, men from Toledo, men from Odessa and Scranton and New Alexandria, and all those men from Assyria. They will assail me and pinch my nipples, and pull up my skirt, and make me pure with suffering. 4 My mother was a prophet and a priestess of suffering. She walked the hospital corridors in her white robe wringing the bones of her hands. My half-sister was a mudfish, whispering warnings in the reeds of the marsh. My mother was a whore, a midget, a human sacrifice, and a candle guttering at the top of a stair. My father came from another world that called him back, and swallowed him like Saturn, like time, like a world without oxygen, or a slow disease. He was imprisoned in a tree by a sorceress one hundred years; he rode with an army on black horses that pounded the earth and raised dust in the mouths of settlers, and when he died his papers were taken away and burned. He then was drowned at sea. My grandmother lived to ninety-seven years through cunning and fornication, but never came to visit or to claim me. I was found beneath a tree by a herd of wildebeests who fed me on salt water and tears of the dead. I endured innumerable blows inflicted by hypocrites. I lay cast out on the ground. No one pitied me or looked on me with kindness. A woman bore me and consented to have me killed. I believe I have a human soul. My name is Sorrow. I fell into the earth like a seed and grew like the grass of the fields and I am alive today by no one’s grace or will. ...