Pharaoh's Daughter / King Solomon's Wife: Fragments from Her Diaries

And the king said, Divide the living child in two . . .

(I Kings 3:25)

Something resuscitates me as, once, in her orbit,

her weather of almonds and figs, I swam

the world in her waters.

                                                    *

Like a doe's hoof, when I came here,

I'm cloven still. But in this mending

light, a shawl the wind darns and unravels,

warming the sky's blue         shoulders, shining through the olive

tree's leaves, I ask myself (torn, sewn)

was I always divided? Was I always only one

among many my father loved dearly, as now among the flocked companions Solomon kisses and savors,

I am only one?

                                                    *

Today I watched him, how the king made whole by splitting

open a lie, its garnet seeds spilling,

its reddened teeth falling out—          a pomegranate.

I watched him see into both sides, as if he could wring out every damp leaf in a forest of cedars,

exorcise it.

I wonder, then, is love always a divided thing,

lusting for no boundaries like the womb's seam

and the parting

between lips?

                                                    *

In the dark, I know the sky's strewn everywhere inside me. But I can't breathe

knowing lovers must be strangers.

I want to live no stranger

to love.

                                                    *

When I floated in her like a language—

her mother tongue—

that felt like ointment and thin branches on my skin,

I was her metaphor.

She fed and ravished me

(why must I remember this?)

with myrrh, bundles of spikenard, red and purple in her hands,

and I grew cinnamon.

                                                    *

" . . . Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth,          where thou feedest . . . . . . For, lo, the winter is past,          the rain is over and gone . . . . . . O my dove, thou, art in the clefts          of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs . . .          let me hear thy voice . . ."

(From Solomon, these lines, "to his fair one" with "doves' eyes." He composed this,

but for whom? Though he taught me

that his god is his true one and only.)

I try to enter the frame of his temple, the beams and rafters of his words,

but its language expels me.

                                                    *

Idealize me and deprive me of my freedom.

                                                    *

I will burn

incense for her—cardamom and clover —and press the ashes of its fragrance

between these pages—

                                                    *

It was healing

to see this morning flame

         still tugging on its wick, suckling, the anise in a crystal          vase, fresh again, by the window-glass.

(But what does this mean?)

And to watch the sky whiten Solomon's vision, his undivided attention to fissure,

to what's as broken into as I've been—

but I must stop this reckless self-pity.

                                                    *

"I / she" made motherless as rain,

as recurring images, fix ourselves,

cracked as a sudden sunset or a dawn,

as a glued vase. Can I be one whole thing?

Must I be only

seen?