shaming me instantly. But
no nectar trickles forth, no manna
descends from the vault of heaven
to feed this pearly syllable, this
package of leafy persuasion
dropped on our doorstep and ripening
before us, a miniature United Nations
“Just like me!” Raven says, citing

the name of her mother’s village
somewhere in Norway, her father
a buffalo soldier. Now,
of course, we can place her:

an African Valkyrie

who takes my breast in her fists

grunting, “This hurts you more

than it does me”—then my laugh

squeezed to a whimper and the milk running out.

Revenant

Revenant

Best Western Motor Lodge,

Where can I find Moon Avenue,

just off Princess Lane? I wandered

the length of the Boulevard of the Spirits,

squandered a wad on Copper Queen Drive;

stood for a while at the public drinking fountain,
where a dog curled into his own hair
and a boy knelt, cursing his dirtied
tennis shoes. I tell you, if you feel strange,

strange things will happen to you:
Fallen peacocks on the library shelves
and all those maple trees, plastering
the sidewalks with leaves,

bloody palm prints everywhere.

Revenant

Palomino, horse of shadows.
Pale of the gyrfalcon
streaking free,
a reckoning—

the dark climbing out a crack in the earth.

Black veils starched for Easter.
The black hood of the condemned,
reeking with slobber.
The no color behind the eyelid
as the ax drops.

Gauze bandages over the wounds of State.

The canvas is primed, the morning
bitten off but too much to chew.
No angels here:
The last one slipped the room
while your head was turned,

made off for the winter streets.

On Veronica

“I sat in front of the mirror, covered it over with
plastic and copied on it the outlines of my face.”

— EWA KURYLUK, JOURNEY TO THE FRONTIERS OF ART

Exposed to light,

the shroud lifts

its miraculous inscription—

a wound. Skin talking:

yes there, touch me there.
The stain of a glance,

a glance caught off-
guard, how it slices,
how each mirror imperils!

Or the acid sweat of sex,
cool ache of a breeze . . .
a hassock, stars.

Heaven encoded in the blue
volume of an arch
imploding,

shadows burned into doorways
at the zero point.
Dots and dashes.

The beloved’s face
captured, rising from zero
onto the glistening plate—

white room, white sky.

There Came a Soul

After IVAN ALBRIGHTS Into the World There Came a
Soul Called Ida

She arrived as near to virginal

as girls got in those days—i.e., young,

the requisite dewy cheek

flushed at its own daring.

He had hoped for a little more edge.

But she held the newspaper rolled like a scepter,

his advertisement turned up to prove

she was there solely at his bidding—and yet

the gold band, the photographs . . . a mother, then.

He placed her in the old garden chair,

the same one he went to evenings

when the first tug on the cord sent the bulb

swinging like the lamps in the medic’s tent

over the wounded, swaddled shapes that moaned

each time the Screaming Meemies let loose,