as a moral or a comedy, she can’t

be sure, only that the girl

never stopped hating her broad,

silk flanks, her viscous nose, the head

double-weighted down with horns.

Even her gentle, chime-like lowing

only masked her human cries: a hunger

she could never satisfy with grass.

The horror, she tries to explain to Jane, is not

that she has changed but that she can’t change

entirely. Memory makes some part of her stay

always the same, and when she looks at Jane

reading on the futon refolded back into a couch,

she cries. Jane, to comfort her, insists

her desire for her is exactly the same, but it cannot be

the same desire. It is an old desire locked

inside a new body, one of clumsy,

twisted fingers, shriveled legs,

bedsores. Even Jane is not Jane anymore

to her, her skin papery where once

she felt plush; no more sandpaper

rasp to the armpits, legs; she even tastes

less musky, as if her very tongue

has dulled. Jane tells her she’s become

more soulful, considerate, as if to make

her differences some new reward, though

this only enrages her. Better

that one day she wakes to find

all memory gone, so that she might inhabit

this new body perfectly, wanting

what she’s always wanted: a whole self

without any sense of loss, even as she knows

loss would always have come for her.

It was built into the equation of any body:

the waning mind, waning desire, the flicker

of a life just fading into the distance. What

are you reaching for, honey? Jane asks now

as she shifts slightly in her chair. And holds out

a glass of water to her twitching fingers,

which she takes, quietly, as if all along this

was what she’d been reaching for.

II

II

Philomela

Philomela

Because her grandmother loved

the arts, her father said, she’d willed

the money to a distant cousin

working as a sculptor. A decision

made the month before she’d died

from cancer, which the young woman

cannot now believe was due

only to a brain tumor, having endured

the last, deliberate ways her grandmother asked

why she’d never married.

The cousin who inherited the money

showed her sculptures in a converted barn,

the only space large enough to contain

the seething shapes that seemed to flame

up from their pedestals

in precarious arcs. An audacity

of engineering the young woman

tried not to see as a reproach

when, curious, she visited:

how the sculptures made her feel

too earthbound, solid. At the gallery,

she stared a long while at what she thought

was a tree blasted by lightning,

but the more she looked, the more clearly

shapes emerged. There

were a man’s hands gripping a slender figure

by the waist, the thin body writhing,

frozen in his arms. It was

a girl, she saw, with shredded

bark for breasts and dark, charred wood