Waiting 6: Bathsheba

Viewed from the voyeur's vantage,
she is only ever Other,
breasts bared or barely draped in dampness,
bathing or emerging from waters,
eyes come-hithering,
sometimes her whole body issuing its
dubious invitation.
No doubt David saw her this way,
eyes surveying the rooftops for all he called his own,
the private and holy ritual she performed
the only thin excuse his lust required.

Only Tissot has her clothed,
prostrate, grieving 
the expendable Uriah, the second 
in a three-stranded cord of griefs:
her body first, then husband, then son.
Had she known how history would blame her,
conflate her name with "Seductress",
she'd have grieved longer,
lain on the floor until
her swelling belly, the violator king's 
bursting offspring, allowed it no longer.
At least Tissot gives her this dignity, letting her grieve
without end, without her body made
a vessel of desire.

Nathan too, though he clothes her by
unclothing the king's lie: 
Nathan the prophet to whom
David's the naked seducer,
his sins stinking to heaven,
the whole world having not
hyssop enough to wash it away.
"You," he says, stripping off the dank,
swamp-sodden disguise,
"You, king, are that man."
Only then
does the whole filthy garment of privilege,
of droit de seigneur, fall
in a bare crumple of repentance.

And grace, breaking its unfettered way in,
makes a record, writes it down:
"Bathsheba, who was Uriah's wife". There,
alongside Rahab, Tamar, the used and maligned.
Grace names and reclaims. Slowly 
Bathsheba rises from grief...