A twice-widowed woman seduces her father-in-law by the side of the road, as blackmail or a bargaining chip. A childless wife offers her servant to her husband as a consolation prize, then banishes the servant and her son to the desert to die. A father is called to murder his son as a sacrifice to God; at the last minute only, the Lord stays his hand. A father is promise-bound to murder his daughter as a sacrifice to God; this time, the child is not so lucky.

These are stories of a world without mercy.

In her poetry collection The Acolyte, Nancy Hightower explores the brutality of these ancient stories with unflinching vision, fully inhabiting the tragedy, the hunger, the passion, the grief. The poetic narratives are familiar, though slightly skewed — a tilt into the uncanny. The language is haunting, the imagery surreal: “Shapeshifting, double dealing / with spies and kings, we lived / on both sides of the looking glass, bathed / in moonlight while keeping watch / for the star to be birthed from our stories” (A Virtuous Woman II).

The narrative is skewed in part because The Acolyte foregrounds the stories of women, the Bible’s minor and supporting characters, so often condemned to horrible and gruesome fates for the edification or punishment of their male connections. For the most part, the women of the Bible are the original “women in refrigerators.” But Hightower depicts these women in all their power and powerlessness, humanity and inhumanity, villainy and virtue.

It can be empowering to reclaim these stories, and also terrifying.

For instance, the story of Jael. When Sisera, an oppressor of the Israelites, fled after a setback in battle, Jael found him. She promised him milk and rest and a safe place to hide. Then, as he slept, she drove a tent spike through his temple: “as the spike hits skin, then, / the skull’s soft crunch” … “just a simple tent nail / and a cup of milk; / we women have our ways” (Jael).

Women, masters of hospitality, of the domestic matters of milk and tents, also emerge as masters of treachery and betrayal. “In the south / things happen. / My mother’s belly juts out malignantly; / Jim says it’s God doing” (PTL: Circa 1981). These Biblical women are liars and tricksters, driven time and time again to subterfuge and disguises to achieve their aims. Tamar dresses as a prostitute to reclaim what’s hers. Leah dresses as her sister to steal her sister’s fiancé. Delilah cuts her lover Samson’s hair while he sleeps and renders him weak.

And yet they are also inevitably disposable: low-value pawns in the affairs of men (and the masculine God is no exception). They can be sacrificed whenever convenient, to achieve the greater good or simply to make a point. (Lot’s wife is another bright thread running through this collection, referenced in several poems; she cast a glance over her shoulder as her family fled the city they’d called home, and the Lord transformed her into a pillar of salt.)

Jephthah promises the Lord that in exchange for victory in battle, he will sacrifice whatever he first sees upon his glorious return. Of course, “Who should come out to meet him but his daughter, dancing to the sound of timbrels” (Judges 11:34). With the lines “No ram to appear / and save me from my oath,” the poem (“Jepthah”) offers a callback to Abraham and Isaac: another sacrifice mandated by God, until the last moment when the Lord relented and sent a sacrificial animal in the blessed boy’s stead. But no such luck for the nameless daughter of Jephthah, who would never have her own story. Like the women of our own time’s mythologies, she exists only as a footnote: a supporting character, fridged to teach her father, and readers like us, a lesson about promises.

“She,” one of the darkest, most brutal poems in this dark, brutal book (rivaled only by “On Eating a Child,” which requires no explanation), lays bare the theme of women as sacrifice — even when the sacrifice of firstborn sons is the only kind that actually matters. Hightower describes the Bible verse preceding “She” as a kind of trigger warning: “But the men would not listen to him. So the man took his concubine and sent her outside to them, and they raped her and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go. At daybreak the woman went back to the house where her master was staying, fell down at the door and lay there until daylight” (Judges 19:25–26).

Can you blame the women of the Bible for fighting back with deception, seduction, treachery — whatever minor weapons they could wield? The story of the sexes is one of asymmetrical warfare.

Hightower’s evocation of these mythical narratives is often subtle and indirect. Vivid images and pregnant metaphors fuse with other myths, chimaera-like: Lazarus meets Orpheus, Psyche meets Moses. The rich symbols can all be remade and repurposed, the stories reinvented as the storytellers change. It takes effort to tease out the connections; these poems are both minimal and dense, and there are no wasted lines.

In “Ritual,” one of the earlier poems in the collection, Hightower writes, “scratched arms and blacked out nights / the bartender and priest who both / know me by name, thoughts dark and hard / and always beyond the reach of God.” Two forms of confession, the profane and the sacred — and poetry, of course, is a kind of confession as well.

In The Acolyte, the profane and sacred come together, sweeping and lyrical, creating alternate meanings from sweat and sacrifice, murders and martyrdoms. “I push my way through voices,” says “Mary(s),” “hair gathered and ready, / only to find you scribbling in the sand, / rewriting the story. / The one they never get right.”

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—George Widener, “Sunday’s Crash”

No Loch Ness Monster Found

We dove deep into the hive, which had betrayed its sacrificial nature through a series of telegrams received in the capital.  It was no longer possible to attend the services of ash.  What I mistook for a frond insinuated itself in my nostrils; no nidor was ever so pleasant, nor as ripe for pillaging.  A vial of marvels flickered in and out on the dais, around which photography capered, dispelling the armor of the state.  My spirit was hidden in a pair of scissors, my fortune in an orange.  Redact this blue sky from every memory my soul has retailed, I instructed my servants.  I waited for sleep’s mask to extend like night onto the surface of the water.  Fur approached us, it glittered upon our necks like some dowsing instru­ment scrimshawed from poached ivory.  Winged creatures flew through vast quantities of water just to bring this sweetness to the prince’s lips.  I didn’t know him, having never lived in this world as a hunter.  You were my body, you sur­vived by travel when all the clocks were consigned to time’s brilliant enigma, you sang the visible echo, the immaculate comb.

Elvis (Not You)

O titanic wound through which biography flows, peel this apple with your scalpel-sharp nails.  I have brought it from the orchard of the soul’s iniquity where celebrity crouches, covering its gaudy genitals with its hair.  I purchased my sorrow from love’s garish kiosk and loaded it like a gun.  The forest is a fool­ishness but we enjoy its company, its broad eaves soughing in the breeze, its emerald lakes.  Around them childlessness coils its lithe and hungry body.  The animals watch from a safe distance, having shed their wings, which only some of them will regrow.  Every tree is a scar from which the chrism drips and we bottle it in this rowboat, which we paddle to the capital, half-capsized.  We will make a lot of money in the black light, sing the policemen on their syncopated beats.  If we try hard enough we can blend in among them, we can wear their darkened glasses.  I confess I never knew the names of all the living, when I moved among them.  Earth had me by the neck, death by the groin.  We made an awkward three-legged figure in the streets, each carrying the others’ crosses.

Dingo Baby Trial

At the edge of the rebirthing machine you tremble, holding out the pieces of your tongue in each palm as if somehow this could save you, could make something different.  You must have had a very large tongue for it to disassemble itself into so many pieces, which feel oddly heavy, as if they have somehow called gravity down to them, an invisible angel made of lead.  The surfaces have mostly dried so that they feel a little like sharkskin, when you shift your weight and can actually feel them as something more than weight, than presence.  From inside the rebirthing machine you can hear the faintest of musics, so faint you can’t be sure whether it’s a clas­sical aria, a pop song from your childhood, or perhaps merely the nonsensical twangle of an ice cream truck circling your neigh­borhood endlessly, suing for custom but unable or unwilling to stop for the children that stumble behind it, licking the blood from their dirty hands.

Mary Rose Lives Again

(But remember:  we are buried under all this humid air.  I fell in love with the marriage feast, the delirious passion of theft upon theft that made the city so much less a dress to me, a living thing playing out its own narrative against the beating of my six-chambered heart, a tent, a chord from which porters carried the gut­tural baggage of surrender to the gray ferry.  A dim loam surrounded me, but I recog­nized it for squander and instead built a golden scaffold, where I briefly paced and slept.  I was never tempted so much as when confronted with the lenity of beati­tudes, the residue of charity which dried and flaked against these mauve-ish prison walls.  Sheathing the blue flame against my thigh like a hunter’s knife I crept into the net, which glistened the way only mathematics glistens on the surface of abstract thought.  I touched it and was caught between worlds, both hand and voice half-lifted to the flag of absence bearing down on me from some great distance it would never absolutely cross even as the bride and groom left the darkening pavilion for the last time, their eyes little economies of scale my breath sank into, unrecoverable as a black box or a private script and just this once neither lusting nor spurning.)

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—George Widener, “Sunday’s Crash”

Knox County Rehab

Dear friend, I am not halfway through loving you.  The pearls of the night-birds shine in the elm trees like hair; they doff their brilliance towards the inanimate so that the animals, arrayed about and below them, glow with a creche-like light.  From my cell I divest them of their longing so that they may be innocent again.  The forest sweeps upon them like a silent storm I have been dreaming of for so long now that it has worn a furrow in my heart.  Dear heart, the seed the sun planted there has withered, won’t you now release the corpse so that I might deco­rate it?  Today is its feast day and all the churches are closed, you won’t feel a thing, I come to you with knuckles of rose hips, arms four-sided and sturdy as the stems of mint.  Tourists mistake the noise of the highway for the sea, or vice versa, but I am an anchorite and I recognize a cave wall when I see one, that is, with the palms of my hands.  They give off music like twin accordions; their lungs are books, and yes, sometimes they sting when you touch them.  Dear heart, dear vexless confidante, touch them.  We are alone together and the forest has grudgingly repatriated all we share, our dowries, the dew inside of which a dozen or more cities were found huddled, shivering, unnameable, unclaimed.

100-Year Elevator

Nothing new will happen; the calendar of our debts swims forward effortlessly through the shadows the trees make on the darkening ground and we are not, as they say, saved.  All through the night I had this feeling of ascending and descend­ing, as if some great ocean were touching me without my consent, finger-spelling all the names of God.  I was kept from loving myself by a diamond pane of glass inside of which a loaf of bread drifted.  Gifts of plate were elaborately described in the brochures, although my name was misspelled.  I polished my glasses so as to see the conductor more clearly.  He said:  When you find yourself dreaming in a language you were not born into, then you may call yourself a man, that is, a clawed being reproduced and reproducible, that melts back into the earth more slowly than snow.

Interim Female President

In this house built of weapons I am assembling a new praise.  It has a gender and the first thing it tells me is that I myself was an accident, an unexpected compli­cation in the contour of these gentle, fox-infested hills.  I was meant to be a world viewed best via painting; I was meant to be a report painting circulated in the market stalls of dawn.  Instead I am a laborer, and mud chinks the wheels of my eyes.  My son wanders blindly in the field of birds, waiting for them to clothe him in sorrow; he can’t hear my call.  He only knows me from the brightness of my reflection, from which sorrow is milled.  Under the new regime I am able to market myself in many forms around the world by air, land, and sea.  It is the ocean I know best, its sleek piano offering the keys of islands up to my touch.  Where are the animals—I keep asking—where are the eyes into which painting sweats?  I track them through the forest and into the hills.  My house watches me, its cannon cocked.  It is my house that brought the election to this continent, it is my house that keeps shedding blood, my house and the new praise I constructed inside it, that fits like a pair of perfect dentures, that chews.  And my house that swallows.  The scars are temporary, and primarily for the animals’ benefit.  A satellite appears in the night sky, a mirror cruelty has not yet broken.  Set my ship to sail against it now that I am homeless, now that my body is a dim grain the earth planes down.  Trees of lead lend their scales to the rain’s ancient heresy, from which the city models its green war.  Triumphal entry, beneath gender’s arch and flag; the speeches, the cavalcade of buds naked in the kitchen.  And the brass I polish them with, which I stole from my master, who left this life in a stone of fury just as the executions began, black beads bound to the carriage’s canted shadow.

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