Body in Bardo: Unvoiced Exposé in Rembrandt’s “Bathsheba at Her Bath”

by Elly Katz

Rembrandt's "Bathsheba at Her Bath" (1654)

What does it say, letterhead downcast at your knee
folded into memory, fluttering like an intimate thrush
you hold to face, to deface in equal measure,
your ironed lips, your nearest
eye nearly shutting?

You open your nudity on the hinge of a free palm
against sleep-crumpled spread
showcasing the distinct hue of you

auburn tufts ribboned in red jewel,
band at the start of your bicep, teardrop at your earlobe,
pendant at the inlet of clavicles
lift gold iridescence off your coverlet.

Your voluptuous flesh in sharp relief
between pale sheet, its overcoat of sun
the space between where your nakedness
netted in thought unthinkingly poses:
a study in symmetry

mature breasts delicately protrude,
soft stomach swoons into gravity’s privacy,
semi-crossed knees lend a foot to
your handmaiden drawn into you, into herself
in dark crenellations on the floor, a bowed angle
angled to cleanse you of you.

David’s handwriting: paragraphs written on your
face, dividing you:
half gripping his letters,
as your other half drafts an opposing set of sentences
in spousal fidelity.

Your thoughts as undressed as you,
so plainly spelled out on your bed, the crackling shadows at your back
ominous with the skid into night.

Temptress torn threadbare by baroque’s moral broker in
rose, saffron, myrrh

redolent strokes of you from 1669,
drama of dark dappled with waning light bathing you into a crossroads,
a Biblical threshold we’re still unprepared to cross.