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?
