Why I Am Glad That You Call Me Wicked
When Simone Weil said it would be wrong
to think the mystics borrow the language of love
for it is theirs by right, though she didn’t call it
the heavenly song of cock and cunt, perhaps that’s
the inevitable conclusion of the sacred heart wounded
into a womb, an arrow in the hand of an angel
piercing such a depth in the body until it’s beyond
what the body knows, delirious among the lilies
or tasting the sweet meats of that table. Yet
whoever the mystic woman is, she’s not ‘about’
sex; it’s not some sexual fantasy that she lies with
in the dark mansion of God, sleeping every night
in a different room, curling herself to the different shapes
of emptiness. It’s not some narrative of first
he this, then she that, that makes her tremble,
being naked and open to nothing but that
noche oscura, when with love inflamed,
the saint runs out of the house into the hills,
for she remains, asleep and dreaming, and in God’s
innumerable rooms, innumerable forms and shapes
of love, she lies down with them all in the depths
of her body and blood, until every vision and icon
shines with a glimpse of the forgotten and atavistic
feminine body, pouring out of her as if out of the nipple
of that blue stone embedded in the miraculous
hand, as she herself becomes her own threshold;
no faces remembered or imagined flicker across the hymen
of her mind, for it’s not a penis, even God’s, that she imagines,
but the form of herself, the knowing of the body
of her own feeling, as in the Old Testament it was said
that Jacob knew Rachel or Lot knew his own daughters,
the knowing of the body allowed only to men;
women, only the known or unknown, as she is known and un-
known but as she knows herself as she knows the other
that she is not: she enters herself, with fingers
of melting wax, of cold cucumber, with a thumb
of glow, with all the abandoned utensils
of domestic life, with a stalk from the forsaken
garden, and with the lost wing feather of the angel
of death and with the voice of a baby’s cry
nursing on the vestigial milk of the mother of mercy.
Copyright Credit: Rebecca Seiferle, "Why I Am Glad That You Call Me Wicked" from Wild Tongue. Copyright © 2007 by Rebecca Seiferle. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: Wild Tongue (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)