She sits, her knees raising
mountains in her robe while Martha hums
disapproval in the kitchen, an irregular wasp,
clattering a twelve-tone canticle between
unwashed dishes and leftovers:

“Slow! Slow! You are so very slow,
you never lift a finger for yourself
or anyone! I’ll make you pay for this
when our friends have gone.”
On and on and yet, she does not mind;
bees sting but they make honey, and you could
swim within his pupils, chase fireflies
catch each one against your sticky palms
forever in the sunset. She knows because
men push past her in the market place
as she reaches for the dates and fish,
unconcerned and ever going somewhere else
without her.

But he,
who steps beneath the lintels
of kings and dead men, suffers her so much
that he looks in her eyes as he speaks
of things she does not understand.

The fire is low when Martha enters
ruddy hands sloughing the thin paste of flour
on the apron at her waist, and her lips buzz
“Well, what did you expect, dessert?
after all you’ve haven’t done?”
“Martha,” he turns his eyes to her,
hands resting in his lap, and she looks through the window
where the porphyr plains stretch like a cloak
beneath the splinter moon.

“Martha, let her choose the better part.
We’re all friends here.”

She didn’t understand until the day
a woman with her name rushed through the door
speaking of rolling stones and empty graves.

II.

She never opened legs, peach ripe
to nameless, hungry harvesters.
That came later, in silent halls
where blood-robed men pronounced
her falling and rising a sacrament,
their diadems sharper than the voices
lining her skull with flax seeds.

As a child, her father beat her with a cane
made from a gnarled fig branch; ten stroke each time
she spilled her food and rolled in it or held
dark conversations with the clouds. When she was young
they kept her, though they grumbled, in the kitchen
hands in the bread and roots until the day
she cracked a ladle on her mother’s cheek and cried
three hours, unable to explain what legion
gripped her flowing hair. Soon after that
the cane splintered on her swollen back,
and she was asked to leave. So, she ran until
her feet bleed dry from scabs and scarab bites.

She never could explain what happened next,
except there were no trumpets, no visions
No god in the machine. There was the dirt,
and then, warm fingers on her chin. She fought but they
insisted, lifting her into two black boxes lit by moons
where nightmares ceased, and the ghosts were tamed.

When she awoke again, he’d sat her in the roots of some
great gnarled fig, a hand on her shoulder, the breeze
in her unveiled hair. She did not understand
why her weary feet could steady when the stranger said
“Stand”, how she followed him through fire,
why she alone of all slept at the foot of his tomb
in the April sun.

III.

She always knew that he could not belong to her
the same as other boys playing in the dirt.
These would stretch out, become creatures
of limbs and shy looks, cutting themselves
on saws and balsa wood in the crafting of
their first lopsided chair. But he—
how many mothers had such reassurance? A pity
she seldom felt assured. Whatever crown he wore
beyond this world, he still tripped on roots
and cried when his knee bled, her gentle ‘hush’
making no difference. He caught agues,
and when he took his first step, he fell down
so startled, as if he’d seen his first bird fly
and found no name for it, until “sparrow” as she knelt
beside him in a pool of azure robes. He smiled and said
he understood, but he forgot again.

She watched him now
an olive tree bent low over the sleeping stranger
eyes anticipating wolves and felt the truth
glide over her like a crow’s wing; for all the world,
some day he would fall down and her thin arms
would never raise him. But now, he was a boy
beset by nightmares. So she stroked his curls
and sang the song her mother taught her first
when the shores flooded, and the fishermen came home
with heavy nets.

I remember, I remember the strangest things
as if they happened a heart’s breath before now.
Yet, I can’t recall your face as I begged, bent-kneed like the pauper I was.
I wanted a ribbon from the tinker’s cart.
A single red ribbon; a herald-rose to offset the winter of my too-tight frock,
my concave stomacher
the starvation of my wheat-bleached hair
(“White gold,” you once laughed through your fingertips).

And you, your legs,
stained with dust and ancient, embalmed sex
stood like heaven’s pillars, unmoved at my condition.
“Clean yourself up,” you said as if god spoke
“or you’ll never marry.”
(you really meant, “you will not escape”)
“And if you want your precious ribbon so,
then eat it.”

Your rough hand on my neck, and it was down.
My stomach closed up like a flower
to vomit it back up ’til I could not feel
how deeply I bled for you, Father.
Harpagon.

I remember,
I remember the strangest things
and each of them are you
vivisected like piles of hard diamonds
beneath a jeweler’s lens.
I divide them with my bleeding nails into
cause and effect, by color and shape
flaws bigger than the cracks in our floorboards upon which you counted
rubies and rubles in the rubble until dawn seeped in
a shower of platinum
over you, a giant with money bags for fists
and I, a poor man’s Danae crouched in the corner.
Your laughter spilled from your lips like hot gold
into the treasure box you kept close in the fortress of your knees.
By day it would lie buried in our garden,
among the overgrown hydrangea and mother’s roses, black
like the veil I could never unwrap from my heart
for you had neglected them to death.
You saw me and looked up, annoyed I think
that you could not put the sunlight on my hair into your box and close it up.
“Thieves are everywhere,”
you said, touching my throat; a warning
“You should mind your own treasure box, my girl.”
Nervous, I said “yes” and closed my legs.

I knew my place. I never again pinched your pennies
to purchase secret girl things now you’d pulled my ribbon off.
Comfits, dolls and rouge,
bottled lavender and rose;
These, these I did without,
preferring a day without the sound of your voice
to batting heavy eyelids at the men
from my velvet carriage seat. But he, but he—
these things Valere did not require, he said
only my body, which when divested of its threadbare gown
reminded him of Leda’s. And he—

his kisses fell like seeds, not like your fists.
And when he yelled at me, I knew he only meant
He hated your white porcelain hands
That shook me by the throat, not me, not I—

I smiled the day he stole your treasure box
and held my waist with one hand,
the other on the rusty handle.
It’s funny.
You looked as dead as I felt;
little man of dust and falling plaster,
chapped lips trembling as your red-rimmed eyes
looked from one treasure to the other. I thought,
“Why did I fear a scarecrow so?”

You said you’d take your gold and the box
was in my hand. (Valere said I could return it).
We stood in the center of your living room
like men in the movies, trading one hostage for another. Only
when you approached, I disobeyed.
I smiled at you and hit you in the mouth
with the rusty edge, and as you fell
bleeding rotten teeth; a pantaloon rag doll
I laughed.

I thought that you had broken, but you stayed down.
I couldn’t even bring myself to spit,
so we left without a word,
the door echoing in your empty house.

Sometimes, alone, I think then you sighed once,
before burying your face in your gold-plated undoing.

I remember, I remember the strangest things,
but not the clotting of the honey, the souring of milk.
And certainly, certainly not the day I realized
his hands upon my stomach were diamond ice,
his face obscured by pearl white fangs.
It was so slow, rain filling up a river.
A frown for the luxury of my new skirts,
a shoulder bone jackknifed against the door
as I powdered my over-ripe honeydew breasts
while searching the mirror for someone I had lost
not these pounds of flesh we have become.

I remember
I remember last night
as you rocked over me, your hands pierced deep
covering my shoulders in long red ribbons of life
As you fill me with—

You say, it is my fault.
There are children now, Elise.
Don’t be a fool.
I am taxed, do you know how they tax me?
We have a house,
A second mortgage
and yet you still—
I put that dress upon your back, Elise!
The pearls in your hair, the smile on your—
Look at me
Look at me
Look at me god damn you!

And I look.
Through your eyes into the back of your skull as you thrust deep
spilling your silver and pearls into your treasure box.

I know my place.
Mouth poised between
your name and seven thousand names for death
I stroke your hair and wait to be closed up
beneath the garden wall again.

They were such strange things to behold
these spine-carved lines that turned my ankles
scraped like tumble weeds against
the serging of my petticoats.
Back then, I merely twitched aside my hems
and passed them by as if they were
no different from the a line of patching tar
curved like a water moccasin along the road.
A trick of gravity, I thought at first
or else the harbinger of an earthquake
prophesied to shake the state about our ears.

At first they were no more than a mirage
dancing between the mountains.
But they came closer, until I could make out
the ghostly sweep of petticoats
the cartwheels turning up ethereal dirt
senseless and unknown to all the cars
darting past like slick water beetles.
Faces lined against a thousand miles,
teeth-cracking winters, the wind of the Great Plains
I watched them pass, a hunching line
eyes heavy with too many burnings,
too many exiles.