She saw him see her from the rooftop as she stepped into the water with her leg penetrating the bright, tense membrane of the surface, on which the stump of it lay reflected, as if in that moment, the ripple quivering from the curve of her calf would make or unmake generations.
Her unclean blood was crusted on the hair that curled like wires between her legs, and, as she sank down, she could feel it soften and drift out to color the water of that making or unmaking. There was a bare tinge of iron smell as she lay watching him watch her breasts buoyed up.
And something in her gave way to him, even then, before he called her to him. Behind her eyes, closed now, yet aware of his gaze on her, between her legs, where the petals of her chaste wifehood were even now loosening at the hip for the soft fall and drift through history. She knew he would call her to him. David, she thought, moaning, while, already mourning, her tongue whispered Uriah!
She could feel the stirrings of kings in her. Where one would enter straight as a scepter, there another would be struck into being, rounded on himself like a scroll, and would uncurl and disclose himself in blood and water mingled, poured out on the royal sheets, the whole line pulled from her open thighs, down to that distant baby expressed into the unassuming straw.
Originally published in The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review