52α.
Enough of Job and Lot, I feel like Jacob
Caught off guard,
his waist pinched in the curve
Of a light-white clench, a brazen bicep closing
Off his breath, a palm atop his heart,
A steady knee behind his aching knee
Folding him down to earth. Sensing the arms
Moving silently to block his next
Attempt at rising, tripping over wings
Mantling his best moves, every
Stance toppled, every gain a loss.
52β.
His sweating back can feel the angel's chest,
Its strange rude heart from paradise in calm
Beats, unruffled by exertion, a clock
To pass the time while its empyrean body
Scissors its legs across his hips and locks,
Snaking an arm past his pulsing neck
Touching his cranium with the sleekest hand
And pressing his cheek into the sand, pausing.
What next, Jacob? Every move is countered.
52γ.
A heave of bulk, a motion to convulse
The torso, stopped at midpoint; the calm breath
On his shoulder regularly puffs and draws
In modest tempo to Jacob's tough percussive
Fear; a moment of repose, the shoulders
Lax, the calves lank, his huffing belly
Still a beat.
Then furious in riposte,
A second in that cosmic clock in which
He feels he can outtrap this perfect foil—
One in which the angel lets him slip:
One leg out, an elbow disengaged,
The head dips slyly down and loosening.
Yet, as any shepherd-story told
Too many times, he should have known the ploy;
Each move he makes to cut the bond between them
Is only repositioning, fitting
His weary limbs into a waiting space
Where the angel stretches as though relaxing,
Even yawning, exercising duty
To his Lord, pressing down and pulling
Jacob's body, never giving out,
Expertly sportive in a deadly contest,
Tough in its relentless strategy,
Ineluctable, so inspiring
Admiration and a nauseous hate.
52δ.
Through bleak exhaustion Jacob's frame goes limp;
The angel could have broken every bone,
Or played his ribcage like a xylophone;
Or plunged his hands under his sternum's point
And pulled his heart out, beating, like a bird.
52ε.
But he does not. Jacob feels the power
Of seraphic fingers twining up
His hair and bending down his knotty neck
And grinding his red face into the sand;
His skin abraded, and his mouth rough
With grit, his chest heeled flat as well, and many
Infinitesimal grains that Jacob never knew
Were lying on the surface of the earth
Suddenly tearing skin, scalp the hair
Upon his breast, sand-stanch the patch of blood
And claw into his eyes. Jacob pukes.
The angel calmly holds him like a nurse
But will not palliate the pain.
52ζ.
He feels the angel's measured breath again
Upon his shoulder, between his shoulder-blades,
And feels the muscles pinning him to earth.
His energy is gone, his spirit zeroed
Out, resigns finally to fate and
Luck; bad luck, worse luck to be Jacob:
He prays to be a stone, to be an ass,
To lose the sentience and carve out from
Experience his human form, and make
This struggle meaningless, as light and quick
As cutting sacrificial rams' throats on the
Altar—over in a moment—splitting
The pale carcass and all the rest a job.
Simple handwork, everyday, routine.
The stars bloom out, the moon already fine.
52η.
And yet behind him, restless to continue
The angel changes stance, curls an arm
Another way, and turns his body, twists
Jacob's body, reversing the panting thorax,
Pins both shoulders firmly to the ground.
52θ.
Now face to face the adversaries lie
And grin in pain or victory, with teeth
Bare and clenched or boyish in demeanor.
The sky is gray and lighter: soon the sun
Will churn the world again into its dance
Of life which is a dance of death. And on his
Chest he feels the hand of this supernal
Man whose face is Jacob's own, whose perfect
Body quelled the coarse one that was his.
