Wearing a plaster corset with a sickle of roses
curved beneath a breast, you are beautiful.

Standing in November (as the dead 
Brown color seeps into the land), 
In waders and in water, with a red

Miss Bloodworth's hat becomes a figure in memory's contract
as it lifts over water the color of tourmaline.

We all believed, if anyone,
you’d beat the body’s rudeness

I remember erecting a screened-in porch
for a house I lived in, the staple gun
all afternoon like a giant mosquito

1.

Max, I lean a photo of Josephine Baker
in this box lined with black construction paper,

Soon, next door, the college kids tip their glasses

                to the falling stars.

as she lies there, her flesh cooling, on a table,
what blush easing the furniture of her body
toward the invisibility in a mirror

How can stone shoulder such scant curiosity, the flesh unpolished
compared to the other, more famous examples of suffering?
Not this one—the sculptor himself cut short of time—

It keeps my sight going, in any case, endlessly
                            across waves of pure, wedding-cake drifts.