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Unfastened avidly from each ivory button
of her spine, the voluntary muscles open
virtuosities of red: Cinnabar

the mutagen, and carmine from cochineal
born between fog and frost, so many little
deaths Buddhists refuse to wear

Never the bark and abalone mask
cracked by storms of a mastering god,
never the gods’ favored glamour, never
the pelagic messenger bearing orchards
in its beak, never allegory, not wisdom
or valor or cunning, much less hunger
demanding vigilance, industry, invention,
or the instinct to claim some small rise
above the plain and from there to assert
the song of another day ending;
lentil brown, uncounted, overlooked
in the clamorous public of the flock
so unlikely to be noticed here by arrivals,

After the trumpets, after the incense
There were nights insomnia fathered gods
I then rejected as too angry or distracted,
Or whose appetite for submission revealed
Their own lack of faith. Say our names,
All synonyms for trust. Others spoke
In sugared paradox: To know is to know

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,
The one large statue in this quiet room.
The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut
Faith’ s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.

The docents praise my elegant design
Above the chatter of the gallery.
Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts —
The perfect emblem of futility.

Mendoza carved me for a country church.
(His name’ s forgotten now except by me.)
I stood beside a gilded altar where
The hopeless offered God their misery.

Alone with time, he waits for his parents to wake,
a boy growing old at the dining room table,

pressing into the pages of one of his father's big books
the flowers he picked all morning

in his mother's garden, magnolia, hibiscus,
azalea, peony, pear, tulip, iris;

reading in another book their names he knows,
and then the names from their secret lives;

lives alchemical, nautical, genital;
names unpronounceable fascicles of italic script;

secrets botanical
description could never trace:

JC was called the Rack
at the work farm,
aluminum milk pails
dangling from his hands.
Once a sudden fist
crushed the cartilage of nose
across his face,
but JC only grinned,
and the man with the fist
stumbled away.

The White Whale Review.

At sixteen, I worked after high school hours
at a printing plant
that manufactured legal pads:
Yellow paper
stacked seven feet high
and leaning
as I slipped cardboard
between the pages,
then brushed red glue
up and down the stack.
No gloves: fingertips required
for the perfection of paper,
smoothing the exact rectangle.
Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands
would slide along suddenly sharp paper,
and gather slits thinner than the crevices
of the skin, hidden.
Then the glue would sting,

You told me the son of Acton’ s town nurse
would never cross the border
into Concord, where the Revolution
left great houses standing on Main Street.
Yet we crossed into Concord, walking
through Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
to greet Thoreau, his stone
stamped with the word Henry
jutting like a gray thumbnail

I hoped, that with the brave and strong,
My portioned task might lie;
To toil amid the busy throng,
With purpose pure and high.

But God has fixed another part,
And He has fixed it well;
I said so with my bleeding heart,
When first the anguish fell.