Each Pore—a Stitch left Out.

Or it might make manifest a Drupe—

Cherry indigo—Cherry stone fruit—

Cherry box—Cherry limb—

Cherry alight—cerises flambées.

Thus my Lust—but the Labor is Manual

And Visual, the workers Children—

The cost Paid by their eyes and hands.

My mother carried several—in her Genuine

Crocodile. To me as a young

Dishevel, they were Signs of Privilege and unkept

Promises of simple Kindness.

A Stack of them—washed and folded—was

A nine-note Chord in a score—the Scene

On each the home of a Faerie—invisible

Creature—in my mother’s glove-Drawer

Garden. Sewn by hungry children.

I have not bought another—but I have

Lusted After. And there was some Panky

In it—when the Pink Baseball Diamond

Arrived, the Chest-Protectors Pink,

I felt, deep inside my Abdomen—

That Girlhood Spasm, like a Faerie gulping

With emotion. It did not happen if my mother

Was anywhere around.

Not that she was a Paedophile

Though flushed exalted at Punishment time—

I think I was not her sexual but her

Corporeal Property—a Child

Worker—25¢ a week.

What my mother had with me was one thing.

What I had Apart from her was Everything

Else—the world of human Beings—

The world of the Faeries—

The world of Art and Commerce and Represen-

Tation and Friends—wise Souls like

Forrest and Karin.

Epidermis Ballad

When I’d been wearing a support sock

on my left leg—my healthy my lean

leg—and I took it off and two

ravine wrinkles had deep-incised

my ankle, the foot pinkish greenish

and cold—I rubbed the whole, lathed,

five-finial member,

and as I chafed it I saw its skin

slide like a thin covering

over the veins and muscles and fat

and the veins below, as if the skin

were a stocking, a sausage casing being

slithered over the offal—I saw that

the epithelium is the body’s wet suit,

its condom, and the body the spirit’s

container, its raiment. And I looked up,

and the drawer handle of the table looked like

a face, the bolts two brass eyes

and the pull a brass smile, and the back

of the frog an amber and brown pattern of

ripples like the grain of curly wood—

the way the lines of wind on water

look like growth rings on wood. And then I

got to where I was going, the sight of his

big ocher body as we paddled around

the end of the dock, washing our hair

and swimming underwater to rinse it—I would

surface dive, and see him flying

above me, buoyant and fresh, gilded

by the summer silt and pollen, not knowing that was

heaven—heaven came first, then would come

burial in the earth.

4

Album from a Previous Existence

PART ONE

If I Had Been Able

If I had been able, as an embryo,

to put my whole face into one of my

mother’s pansies, I would have. As a child,

I’d squat—sitting on my heels, resting my

pointed chin on my knees, the soles of my

feet on the ground except where my arches