"Song for the Incarnate" - an Excerpt from On Cold Mornings

My initial comments will make most (or least) sense to my fellow Christians, but I hope the gist of them and my final comments introducing the poem will make sense to anyone at all who believes that our love (romantic and otherwise) is meaningful and beautiful, unless we selfishly make it otherwise.

Traditional readings of the Songs of Solomon have tended to shy away from the overt sensuality of the poem, at times straining even to acknowledge it at any level as a very human love poem.  Instead, finding it uncomfortable yoking the sensual and the spiritual, scholars have "spiritualized" the text to the point of, in my opinion, robbing it of its human vitality.  More accurately stated, it has seemed to me that biblical interpreters have robbed the poem of its deeply incarnational message--even as they insist that the poem is, in the end, all about Jesus as the groom and his people as the bride.  By doing so, they rob human love, including sexual love, of its incarnational value.  What do I mean by "incarnational" value?  Simply put (though not at all simple):  God's spirit working in us and through us, in the totality of our humanity, that inseparable unity of body, soul, and mind, and in and through our human community (marriage, friendship, a fellowship of believers, etc.).  Years ago, one friend said of sex that "God has ordained the marital passion pit."  Pit? Why "pit"? A low place?  A hole in the ground?  What good things happen in pits?!  And while I can agree with the theological gist of what my friend said apart from that horrid word, "pit," I do not feel inclined to keep the subject--or the act--so emotionally distant by "elevating" it with such formal language, while also consigning it to whatever sort of pit my friend had in mind.  Ugh.  

I grew up in a social and religious tradition that did not know how to speak of human love, especially sexual love, without great discomfort, as physicality was virtually equated with temptation and sin, the body being the source of the worst temptations and thus the source of the worst evils.  I find all of that to be very sad and destructive, and even unspiritual, but I will not attempt here to lay out explanations.  Instead, I will ask you to read my poem.

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Song for the Incarnate
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down a dark vacancy and dank
I rock legs drawn up head dropped
arms taut like hemp rope trussed
around knees knowing one thing
I fear my dear damn Self the most
don’t let me rail revile rage dear
against my world I will destroy it

oh my darling your deep breasts
like twin gazelles your neck nubile
ivory tower heart pulse warm
your hair a wild paradise pillow
of silk river I lie down beside you
my left arm cradling your nape
my right hand caressing, loveliness
​
oh, calm me from my rage
my love my queen incarnadine
and drown me draw me in
darling deep pools your eyes
I breathe your nectar sweet aroma
I taste your tongue I love you
oh my God love me with her body