about it all, later, I don’t keep your letter, I want to hurt you,

and this is the only way I know how.

CRONE

CRONE

In her fifties

Tracey Emin married

a stone. She who had fucked

her way through every drawing

she ever made was now renouncing sex.

I had to look

at my own desk with some despair. Freud

brushed round and round

the breast. Balthus never stopped

painting the pubescent crotch.

In the novel you wrote about us

you never hit me; and when I asked you why,

you said in surprise

It was never about that.

Your work is all heart and mine—

mine is the wound.

Every marriage

is made of stone and like a stone

you sink, your home

is at the bottom. There was a space beneath the floor

in the cabin

full of roaches and I dropped a pen down there, once,

and had to feel for it

in the beetled dark made a wish became

a princess was saved by a steed and yet

here I am. The bottom. The stone. The garden, in spring,

a beautiful wedding.

DAPHNE II

DAPHNE II

He       moved       on. I could have       changed back       shed the

leaves

stepped free of the

bark gone on       my way but now       this       is my way.

In the       cool          green

even the woodcutter kneels.       Doesn’t dare

show me his    saw.

I like to see the men panting       heavy-eyed on their       horses

sniffing for       beauty as for truffles       you can’t carry it    off

without       destroying it       that’s what I

would tell him       now       that’s what I       meant, when the river

took me from his

arm.

And yet because he touched me       I am          this.

I see the sun       every day       after all

how it hits me       in hours       all over

until the night       scrapes him       away       in layers       and I turn

again       to silver

THE COLLECTOR

THE COLLECTOR

I took the girl’s drawing and put it on a table near a closet.

How much, a man asked, how much?

It was not for sale. He touched the corner of the paper, said

It doesn’t look like you. That’s because

it’s not, I replied, three walls of my newest drawings

dripping at my back. Star maps.

Fields. I knew him, a collector, who had bought

my first nude

fifteen years before.

He bent lower over the page.

These? you had said, shaken, when I showed you

my notebook.

These are all me?

It’s your pride

that haunts me,

my smile limp as I collected the compliments

of colleagues, one eye

on the door. The girl didn’t show up.

Nor did the dragon.

The man would not move

from the table, as if

at the bedside of a dying

wife. I told him:

Just take it.

He hurried from the room

before I could change my mind,

the drawing

pinched beneath his thumb.

I was nowhere

and you

were nowhere