the legendary Venus of Willendorf.
Just a replica, natürlich,
a handful of primitive stone
entombed in a glass display
the innkeeper kept dusting as he told
his one story, charmed by the sight of
a live black girl. Not five kilometers!
he repeated, stopping his cloth

to reexamine the evidence:

sprawling buttocks and barbarous thighs,

breasts heaped up in her arms

to keep from spilling.

We should have kept her, he said.

Made the world come to us

here, in Austria.

“Here” seemed

hardly Austrian, although the Danube
had wandered through, scooped out a gorge
and left it clotted with poppies to dream
the haze of centuries away. Each morning
she heard children tumbling down the path
to catch the 7:10 on its milk run
to the school in Krems. Each evening
the Munich-Vienna express barreled through
at precisely—another miracle—
7:10.

It was impossible, of course,
to walk the one asphalted street
without enduring a gauntlet of stares.
Have you seen her? they asked,
comparing her to their Venus
until she could feel her own breasts
settle and the ripening
predicament of hip and thigh.

They were on the veranda

when he confessed—no, “confided”

(wife occupied in the kitchen, slicing cake)

that his pubic hair had gone white.

She should have been shocked

but couldn’t deny the thrill

it gave her, how her body felt

tender and fierce, all at once.

What made one sculpture so luscious

when there were real women, layered

in flesh no one worshipped?

The professor’s wife, for instance,

hair too long and charred eyes

wild in their sockets as if to say

Where thou goest, there I went also—

no one devoured her with his glance as she

cleared away the tea things.

In Willendorf

twilight is brutal: no dim tottering
across flowery fields but blindness
dropped into the treeline like an ax.
He won’t dare touch me,
she argues, and risk destroying
everything. Yet his gaze, glutting itself
until her contours blazed . . .
and suddenly she understands what made
the Venus beautiful

was how the carver’s hand had loved her,
that visible caress.

Lightning

then a faint, agreeable thunder
as the express glides past below,
passengers snared in light, smudged flecks
floating in a string of golden cells.
If only we were ghosts, she thinks,
leaning into the rising hush,

if only I could wait forever.

Incarnation in Phoenix

Into this paradise of pain she strides

on the slim tether of a nurse’s bell,

her charcoal limbs emerging from crisp whites

unlikely as an envelope issuing smoke.

I’ve rung because my breasts have risen,

artesian: I’m not ready for this motherhood stuff.

Her name is Raven. And she swoops
across the tiled wilderness, hair boiling
thunder over the rampart of bobby pins
spoking her immaculate cap. She dips once
for the baby just waking, fists punching
in for work “right on schedule”—
bends again to investigate what
should be natural, milk sighing into
one tiny, vociferous mouth. “Ah,”
she whispers, “ambrosia,”