Lot's Wife

LOT'S WIFE / David Wojahn Narrow white streets, the iron gate. With her husband she follows the angel who floats like fire, who soon will ignite with his blue troubled eyes the city she knows best— her friends who bicker in the crowded bazaar, precarious vessels balanced on their heads. And her husband, the dark veins of his forehead throbbing, how does he converse with a being made wholly of light? Up the goatpath rimming the town, foothills with their winter mantle of rust, she wants to touch the raiments of the angel, there below the elbow, the way she would touch her husband on the days she sees him as a stranger, whispering to him J am here, as if she could lose herself in the furrows of his otherness. She wheels back now at who she was—a landscape of flame. Who is this man I have known so long, his eyes possessed by the god who conspires with him, for whom I've abandoned myself? And the seizure of transformation, the single spasm that rivets her to earth, 42 ¦ The Missouri Review the salt-taste for an instant in her mouth, then the taste, undecipherable, of nothing. The angel with his fiery palm now shades the husband's eyes, blinded by the whiteness before them, the purity, bitter and dry, of the saved. David Wojahn THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 43 ...