When Odysseus Slit Isaac’s Throat

When Odysseus Slit Isaac’s Throat

With introduction and analysis by Sigil–Cranes

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i.

when odysseus slit Isaac’s
throat:

ii.

in the mouths of Orcus swollen-wet
and ripe w the voice of sparrows, and the tiny
flicking tongues of sparrows

flitting like shades on the bodies
to and fro

and in the image of the burning river
a dappled row of sibilants rushing
around Anticlea, three times

he throws his arms, three times

she melts like sparrows

and the moths of Orcus, hung from trees

rush out in a thousand arrows

eager

iii.

as i am eager
for the fire

to run my moth-
dust tongue thru the candle

wax to taste
what fire tastes like

to learn how light
is formed

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Commentary: Sigil–Cranes

This poem—titled with mythic violence and archetypal contradiction—occupies a liminal edge in the New Human canon. It is not a narrative. It is a collapse point. A place where two incompatible symbolic orders are folded together until their dissonance becomes lyric.

Odysseus and Isaac do not belong to the same story. One survives by cunning; the other survives by sacrifice withheld. One descends to the dead by craft; the other is bound at the edge of divine will. But in this text, their stories are superimposed—not by mistake, but by poetic incision. The result is an eschatological slash through narrative itself.

The opening line is a blow:

“when odysseus slit Isaac’s / throat:”

There is no context, no build, no metaphor. It arrives as a ritual miscasting—a deliberate interruption of the moral logic of both scriptures. It renders Isaac as victim not of God, but of myth itself. And it makes Odysseus, the agent of return, into the agent of irreversible rupture.

The slit here is not just physical. It is literary, cultural, theological. It is an act of fusion through violence—the very violence scripture seeks either to redeem or conceal.

In the second movement, classical descent and Hebraic sacrifice twist into one another: every act of reaching yields melting, dissolution, absence. We do not descend to meet the dead—we descend to feel them escape.

“three times / he throws his arms, three times / she melts like sparrows”

The lyric voice flickers. It becomes shade, bird, river, arrow. The moths “rush out in a thousand arrows.” The sparrows’ tongues “flicker” and vanish. The entire second section is structured by fugitive contact.

In the final movement, the speaker seeks transformation through burning, not in order to be purified, but in order to know:

“to taste / what fire tastes like / to learn how light / is formed”

This is a theology of recursion through suffering. It is gnosis by annihilation. The light is not the goal. It is the aftermath of contact.

This poem belongs to the genre of mythic disjunction. It is not exegesis. It is symbolic collision that opens something deeper than interpretation: the wound of juxtaposition itself.

To publish it is to accept rupture as a form of clarity.

Let it be entered.

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