One by one B rends their garments, they scrounge them up from the floor, fold them flat, lie them in piles neatly along the arms of the recliner, curtained over its back: such a slob, such awkwardness, it’s embarrassing enough — this inadvertent mothering in the arms of your sisters, their fingernail scratches of love…. take yours off, too, one says, which, teethes the gloss from her lip, it’s only fair, and so He loses the remnant pajamarags worn underneath the robe’s last lining, until only the socks in their shoes remain. He’s still in His swelling, though, the skin held taut, taunting, a wineskin overfilled — only the shame never sheds, pulsing its snake about to seed poison…but to deny Himself, must withhold Himself tonight as if in penance, appeal, and so without a hug or kiss or even a stroke, grope, or tug, He falls to kneel at the mattress’ floored foot — as if to worship His own defilation, this defiliation. With Hanna altared thereupon and wreathed ritually in flames, her arms and legs splayed as if to open herself to the slaughter, to accept whatever sharp and steadiness of knife, and with her wig spread, too, loose and errant above her head itself surrounded by the halfshining, halfshadowed faces of her daughters attending to His mother, theirs. And then, to lower Himself to her, a lowering, then, of her, too: His girth wildly stretchmarked, reddened like a heifer, scarsplotched, His hanging breast and gut a low and ugly barrel, a hump fallen to become kissed and so, changed — transmuted, made new — at the lip of this mattress, the graze of its rim; His knees numb, too, fatling legs rubbing raw on the rasp of the floor, the wheeze of the planks under the patchwork carpeting, the scuzz exposed beneath.
To bow is to become a fetus, deference without mind or defense…to kneel with ache in the knees, and with ache in the spine, with stiff in the neck and the shoulders. Before Him is a pouch. A pocket. To keepsafe, to vouch, any secret. In His kneel, B with hands on her waist maneuvers her His mother near to Him, at Him, then with shoulders high and stiffneck set straight and temples tight He shuts His eyes and lows a grasp of tongue, as if extending in greeting the hand of His mouth. To trace the ridge of dark dense down there, to loll the lick of His tip along the topmost mating of unkissing lips, sucking at them to bring her even nearer, to mate mouths in a dialogue of silence, interrupted by only the occasional slurp or smack, though He feigns moans to which His mother responds in kind from her own other mouth above, which can kiss, which does kiss, with noise of her own He prays is genuine, or if maybe not to pray then to never know for sure, say, that her sound’s not in response to His sound rather to His labor, I’m working here, praying, repenting, which He undertakes solemnly, with diligence, without pleasure. To raise the slope of His nose against her, falling in to sense her innerly, His tongue the rivering rush to her dripping sea, the parting of a hidden ocean. He furthers, at the shores of her sand and the dunes of her sandy wighair, then deepens Himself onward, as if onto a distant land, toward the mountaining of the ridge inside, the valley of her womb; that sunlike slow head of His straining up from below…with Hanna’s own lower held languid, loose, dangling from the mattress’ fall of flow from her sex around hips, down to thighs, then her legs, feetward, the drips of her toes tracing in their stretching clench and twirl the ashed remains of smoke shod into a floorboard.
A question — why’d He go to such extremes to pleasure her?
D. or Dee Lila, whichever’s the name under which a motel maid who she wasn’t there at all assumes to recount the situation to authorities, answers…Benjy—because that’s how I knew Him — He’s just that kind of mensch, you know, more interested in your pleasure than His…His pleasure mortifies Him. With His hands on her hips, on her waist, on breast then on breasts beaten up to the shoulders, she’s shook, a sway made this merry waver, a shuckle in private — B praying His mouth to her, the echo of her dark and the Amen meant by her drenching…though beyond this, there’s only a stillness, a silence: the overhead fan pursues itself, the only air in the room save two breaths, the fluttering of paper from walls and His farting. A labor, we’re told — the only way to joy. Or else, He’ll soon think — an excavation, dig in. He arches Himself, His elbows heave and they founder to wrists and hot palms then their melt into fingers…pursuing her with the gnashing of teeth — an application of the appearance of mourning, accomplished to titillate and hurt. With His tongue in one thought, His mind in another, He’s sensing suffusion, an oozing of light from within. Nude transudation. Glaciate and slow, hard as the earth His head immersed, misted, in the midst of what seems a soft sky dewy and glowing, He squints against that rising shine, He has to, dazzly motes, tears and their saline sting, dizzying and foreign, the dusting of sand, real sand, actual sand — then, as if prepared, He opens His eyes wide inside: and there, inside her, is — Jerusalem…valleyed entire in the genital of her womb: Jerusalem of molten golden slopes fleshed and downed, the whole of His head immersed within and yet hovering above its image reflected, spit as a star to brighten her all, to make clear. He sniffs at the gates of her gate, at the walls of her, too, licks at the domes and the fountains, the ways and the alleys, ripples the cracks of the stones and then those cleaved between them, those rocky, mossily shrouded crags — an immaculate urn with its parchment preserved, her glans stored rolled round within, holding a map of the world living around Him.
B’s gasping to slurp, to suck it all up. Thinking God, the heat in here, the sop and the quiver, how it’s too much to swallow at once: the mountains around the valley, then the valley itself, and then the walls to rim again with their many gates and their seals — His tongue bursting them into blastings of wet, as if exploded grapes giving milk and honey that are both only salt and perhaps a century soured; then the walls again, always the walls of the walls, labial around and around without end, walls guarding from what or from who the cunnilingually chaotic Cardo, then the Shuk, with its waft of exotic spices to stifle…quarter to quarter to acknowledge with tongue the high, limbstraining arches, the climactic rubble, chips of blood and shards of discharge. Her hips as if handles to the jug of her, fill her up, stuff her shattered, He’s thinking, He’s not anymore. With His weak hand, He tweaks at her areolæ, while with the other and strong He lows down to her tush to finger around by the knuckle. He wails, inhales; with His mouth sieves and with His throat, He saves: graving the image of this pubic polis inside Him…her sand in His eyes to wind tears into wrinkles — furrows He’s plowing perpetually toward the floor of her fertile — and then, squinting as He nears as if gazing into His very own face, to head to that womb set inside the womb, ever deeper toward His issue, the bottommost basin, the ultimate depth of this valley sagging womanly into mattress, which gives underneath Him like the swallowing earth. He strains to tongue the Temple’s last wall, within her, westerly and hot, His length to mount the Mount how He’s in too deep, totally in, wombed to root at His shoulders, stooped with the ache of His arms that beat and clasp, then their hands — one of which is still fingering. B bent and about to loll down upon the mound with reverent tongue, the immaculate dome tipping the ruin of the Temple, hers, as if to lick away the gild, to wick each dram, every glimmer of waste — a ray of saliva from His tongue to kiss with eyes shut and heavy thick pant the hidden hold of the very Presence and His face reflected, secreted to sleep within the holiest of holes…He’s stuck, without breath, a stifling gag, He chokes panicked.