How could the child see an animal not yet born?
A dark calf clothed in its own white zodiac, still wet
with birth three months since she had dreamt it.
Could she hear it growing with the sensitive ears
of a chantress? Hear where the dark places met

with the white and the hard with the soft? Or did
she feel its warm body as though through a veil
of living light: a young midwife touching
a baby’s head by turning the hips of its mother?
Even then she understood the turning of things,

bodies, voices, and the heavens, but she would
soon learn to hide her talents and the luminous
animals of her dreams. Sick at their conception,
it would be many years before she cried out
with her sisters, answering the rough beast’s call
to worship with strange, ecstatic song.

What was it, truly, to see with the outer eyes
of the flesh? Did it make plain all occult forms?
Or the wheel turn? Did it reveal the liquid voices
of the elements or the divinity of the hours?
In any case, the child could not speak of it,

not to those who broke things just to see what light
they held. Not to men who took the lives of beasts
because they did not have a soul. With all their ears
they could not hear the music: the sound of temple bells
among the grasses or the echo of a form inside a form.

The woman is perfected
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

Glancing once, the Indian
Has woven into you an alien strangeness

You die in. It’s as though some burning sky
Had crashed down on you. Then, a crack across
Your face appears, and spices pile up high
Upon your Nordic mind, now at a loss

To help—no power can dispel the charm.
The sun ferments; the fever falls and rakes
You. Shafts rise, joyous with impending harm,
And poison glistens in the snakes.

Destroy me star
-says the poet-
pierce me with distance’s arrow

Drink me source
-says the drinker-
to the dregs drink me to nullity

Let sharp eyes deliver me
to devouring landscapes

Words meant to save the body
may they bring me precipices

A star will sink its root in my forehead
the source will lend my face humanity
and you’ll awaken silent
in the palms of stillness
at the heart of the thing.