In the Kingdom of Pleasure

Unwitting accomplice in the scheme of law she thought to violate, man-set as it was, and, here, inconsequential as the sun at midnight, drought at flood-time— when she heard a baby in the tall reeds at the river’s brink, she was nobody’s daughter, subject of no rule but the one his need for her established as she knelt down to quell his crying with a little tune just seeing him there had taught her how to hum. Now as then, it is the same tune, timelessly in time, your mother hums as she kneels down beside your little barge of foam, smiling to see you smile when she wrings out from the sponge a ragged string of water over the chest and belly, the dimpled loins, the bud so far from flowering, and the foot slick as a fish your hand tries to hold up till it slips back splashing with such mild turbulence that she laughs, and you laugh to see her laugh. Here now, as it was then, it is still so many years before the blood’s smeared over doorposts, before the Nile clots with the first-born, and the women wailing,wailing throughout the city; here now again is the kingdom of pleasure, where they are safe still, mother and child, from the chartered rod of the Fathers, and where a father can still pray, Lord, Jealous Chooser, Devouring Law, keep away from them, just keep away.