Pharaoh's Daughter / King Solomon's Wife: Fragments from Her Diaries

Abstract

Pharaoh's Daughter / King Solomon's Wife:Fragments from Her Diaries Yerra Sugarman (bio) And the king said, Divide the living child in two . . . (I Kings 3:25) Something resuscitates me as, once, in her orbit, her weather of almonds and figs, I swam the world in her waters. * Like a doe's hoof, when I came here, I'm cloven still. But in this mending light, a shawl the wind darns and unravels, warming the sky's blue shoulders, shining through the olive tree's leaves, I ask myself (torn, sewn) was I always divided? Was I always only one among many my father loved dearly, as now among the flocked [End Page 43] companions Solomon kisses and savors, I am only one? * Today I watched him, how the king made whole by splitting open a lie, its garnet seeds spilling, its reddened teeth falling out— a pomegranate. I watched him see into both sides, as if he could wring out every damp leaf in a forest of cedars, exorcise it. I wonder, then, is love always a divided thing, lusting for no boundaries like the womb's seam and the parting between lips? * In the dark, I know the sky's strewn everywhere inside me. But I can't breathe knowing lovers must be strangers. I want to live no stranger to love. * When I floated in her like a language— [End Page 44] her mother tongue— that felt like ointment and thin branches on my skin, I was her metaphor. She fed and ravished me (why must I remember this?) with myrrh, bundles of spikenard, red and purple in her hands, and I grew cinnamon. * " . . . Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest . . . . . . For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone . . . . . . O my dove, thou, art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs . . . let me hear thy voice . . ." (From Solomon, these lines, "to his fair one" with "doves' eyes." He composed this, but for whom? Though he taught me that his god is his true one and only.) I try to enter the frame of his temple, the beams and rafters of his words, but its language expels me. [End Page 45] * Idealize me and deprive me of my freedom. * I will burn incense for her—cardamom and clover —and press the ashes of its fragrance between these pages— * It was healing to see this morning flame still tugging on its wick, suckling, the anise in a crystal vase, fresh again, by the window-glass. (But what does this mean?) And to watch the sky whiten Solomon's vision, his undivided attention to fissure, to what's as broken into as I've been— but I must stop this reckless self-pity. * "I / she" made motherless as rain, as recurring images, fix ourselves, cracked as a sudden sunset or a dawn, as a glued vase. [End Page 46] Can I be one whole thing? Must I be only seen? Yerra Sugarman Yerra Sugarman was born in Toronto and lives in New York City. She received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry from PEN American Center for her first collection, Forms of Gone (2002), published by Sheep Meadow Press. She has received a Discovery/The Nation Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award, a Chicago Literary Award, and an Academy of American Poets Prize, among other distinctions. Her poetry and articles have appeared in numerous publications, and her poems have been translated into French. She holds degrees from Columbia and Concordia Universities, and from The City College of the City University of New York, where she is a Lecturer in English and teaches in the undergraduate and M.F.A. creative writing programs. Copyright © 2007 The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc.