Judith and the Head of Holofernes

                        after Klimt

1.

Give me a beguiling tongue,

I whisper to the Lord
when the general approaches with his infinite army.

I bathe in oil of lily,
put on my gold, my robe

2.

of joy.

            My teeth, polished ivory beads.
            My lashes, death-heavy.

In his tent I fall to my knees in homage
until his servants lift me.

Three years and four months
since my husband.
In widowhood I have not grown dry but

3.

gorgeous with grief, with hunger.

The general says he’s never seen
such breasts,

                        like dolomite
                        tipped in nectar,

or such a halved and pitted wild apricot

4.

of a navel.

He sends his men away.

Ecstasy has a scimitar’s edge.
Under his purple canopy,
I lead us to it

5.

slowly.

He says he’s never touched
hair so dark,
black and fathomless as
the mind of God, before God
conceived of stars

or women.
(I told my people,
Never put the Lord to the test. Let Him
use you as His instrument. He
expresses Himself that way.)                    

Drunk, the general shuts
his eyes, says I could die

6.

in you.

I never knew how much I wanted.

Use me, I say. Please.
I am speaking to the Lord, but
the general doesn’t know.

My opened garment, green and blue.
How I move within its folds.

                        Lord, isn’t this how you created the world?
                        Out of passion, out of death?
                        Maybe genesis itself was a kind of
                        killing,

7.

                                                Yes,

                        an ending to millennia of stillness,
                        a cutting through a peace as dark and rich as my hair,

                        and we and the gazelles and every apricot

                        are scattered echoes of a cry that combined release
                        with pain.

To realize this
is oneness,

followed by a rush

of red.

I have never known how much I wanted
to feel the head of a man
at rest

like a planet
in my hand.

Widow’s Song 

This world I walk with rhythmic steps
is wholly you—

                                                no less than you.

What are pyramids and sun temples to my eyes?
Crumbs fallen from your lips.

What is a carpet of pine needles
to my bare feet?

                                                Tender menace

of your touch.

What are anemones and stars in saltwater tides?
                         Your clean, clairvoyant organs.

One night you said, Your heart’s beating
hard, then slept

                                                with your hand across my throat.

Even parted, we are a drum:
                                                your tears are still

on my wrist, and I’m pulsing always against
the skin of your life. The gods use us to make music

                                                only they can hear. 

*

Rose DeMaris is a poet and teacher. Her poetry appears in New England Review, Narrative, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, and on poets.org. She has received Orison Books’ Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry and the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. Her translations of poems by Palestinian Lebanese writer May Ziadeh were spotlit by the Academy of American Poets.