Cups and swords the prophet fed from, led with,
and an inlaid box with a hair from his holy beard,
all wrought with gold and strewn with jewels like fistfuls

I’ve inherited famine.
Taste, a gluttony: my mirrored crawl.
The women of my line dwell in fractions,

          —A sunlit lot. Clear-cut.
                Slash smoulders. Crabs of a beer-
colored grass. A torn-up midden heap,

This is how I have always drawn myself,
skirted and level, not half so spiral as what, as me.
This is how I have always, and suffer it

I’m laughing at her, that red-cheeked doll,
my storm-of-the-century. She is icicles!
I’m hoarding odd gallons, dreaming of fear.

Here, where the skeins have grown heavy with maybe
salmon at best, where even the choicest bait’s gone
green—the strongest lines left snapped like string; here, where

I guess at last the wall became a kindness,
something, cut off as we were, we could stand
to believe in. Fourteen miles of thatch and thorn.

I got the call at 4 a.m. David said that he’d been up
since three. “It’s bad, man,” he told me on the phone.
“Just talked to the Head Guy. They’ve botched surrealism,

Catholics don’t believe in abortion, Miss Del Greco said.
Even if it’s true they multiply like rodents.