Menstrual tensions
Unclean!
Thus the Judaic law,
framed, of course, by men.
How dare they!
This, your most womanly time,
when you become most other,
an alien being beside me in the bed,
your woman body working its own mystery,
wracking you with cramps,
changing your mood in unpredictable ways,
at the same time becoming you softer,
warmer,
more all-embracing.
Even your smell is different.
It is a messy time.
I wonder how they managed
in the days before sanitary towels were designed.
Did the scent of blood drive men crazy,
creating the first vampire legends?
Did they wake their vulpine natures
to howl at the moon?
Perhaps this is what frightened them, those Jews,
whose laws superseded the two greatest commandments
with a host of commands and prohibitions,
at least one for every day.
Here, among them,
at least half their subjects
became once a month,
literally, lawless.
Or, more accurately,
governed by their own bodily laws,
over which no man could take control.
It must have seemed to them a kind of anarchy
(though God-prescribed,
so part of the Plan,
however incomprehensible
as they gathered in their priestly councils).
And what if the other half of the nation
were to start responding
autonomically to their own biological rhythms,
performing diastole and systole
written in flesh, not enscrolled in spider-scratchings?
Adam and Eve might then
tear off their figleaves
and open their eyes
to the Edens around each of them,
the paradise denied them only by the fiery sword of their own self-imposed shame.
So would end Law and (worst of all)
Religion,
the rule of men give way to the role of love.
Declare them unclean
lest, touching that softness,
man might discover his own softness,
a womanliness within which has no gender
save acceptance of all different modes of being
among a single humankind.
Last night
you left a small stain on my bedsheets,
a leaking,
a mark of memory,
a promise of your return.
And dried blood clotting my groin-hairs.
On her birthday,
Coniston,
February 10, 2001
