abishag and everything between

I wrote this poem after thinking about the story of King David and the virgin brought in to keep him warm at night, related in the first chapter of 1 Kings.  I tried to imagine what that meeting must have been like between them, that old man on his deathbed and the young woman, "winner" of the beauty contest.  A good friend and theology professor has told me that if David did not "know" her, it wasn't from lack of trying.  This tradition of selecting a virgin to sleep with an aged king was meant to discover whether he were still virile or whether he were about to die.  Ownership of the girl was a sign of who was the rightful king, and Solomon had Adonijah put to death when the latter requested, through Bathsheba, to take Abishag to wife.  But as I imagined this meeting, I wondered what expectations David and Abishag might have brought to that moment...and how the reality contrasted with those expectations.

abishag and everything between
"So they sought for a fair damsel...and brought her to the king."

she bathes

thinks of the lion and bear

and the beautiful boy

his sun-baked skin, his nipples, his hair

his sling-armed violence, the stone and philistine.

her sisters chant hero-songs

mix oil and powdered spices

anoint her nakedness with fingers that think of him

that linger and linger. she knows---

she has seen ewes rammed

seen father mount

slave-girls on the threshing-floor in the grain

and mother

spinning spinning at her furious loom.

she waits at the door (watched by priests

and aging concubines)

not knowing

the cloistral shapeless he

whose outraged bowels defile him every night

awaits the fearful dissolution

awaits the gift she does not know

is hers to give.

she enters

and weeps---

because this old man is that boy

because he needs a flameless heat

because he hears music in her callused fingers and smells

jesse’s flock in her hair.

because she knows

and knows she knows.

for he is weeping too because

of everything between.

9/8/98