| Midrash on an Italian Stiletto |
|
| Written by Val Grimm | |||||
| Tuesday, 08 November 2005 | |||||
|
Poetry It began in tears and the rending of veils Hagar twice exiled from her master’s house once by choice and once by force; women working God’s unspoken word - as Lilith must have, mating with demons. “Let me not see the death of the child” she cried, and God did not hear her; a male infant’s wailing was more audible, even then. That Issac might lie on his altar and disprove the whisper of Satan he made a spring seep up out of the sand for the mother of the archer to suckle, and so it is said succour the ancestor of Mohammed. And so Abraham argued with Abimelech about that miraculous water which he claimed he had dug as he was of the line of Shem. Eventually in the way that men solve their arguments with strange bargains of flesh, they were reconciled and Abraham returned to his son who was old enough to speak by now, and to carry wood. Isaac only asked once, as he walked with his father to the sacred place at the top of the mountain; “Where is the lamb for a burnt offering” (Why is this day not like other days?) Instead of explaining this bitter herb, his father said “God will provide.” The child might have wept bound hand and foot or perhaps he was good (quiet) because he knew the secret: that the young men tending the ass would return him to his father if he fled, would bind his mouth if he cried out. And then as the knife fell the Lord’s sudden reprieve. Was this dagger also averted by the subtle hand of providence? This doubledged blade with a bone carving of a man upside-down and beautifully fettered -- a face the carver’s finest chisel licked from an elk’s ankle or perhaps a cow’s, the miniature limbs like blades of grass dessicated in a drought. Its shape against the blind palm in the dark must have hurt, like a knobbly chunk of volcanic rock, or a frail infant’s wrist, hand salient against a ground argent become a thing like this turned over in another’s hand, the instrument to an end.
Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.12 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved. |
|||||