Lord, one day you’ll find these in a locked box, unlocked

by your daughter, who will roam with you to the fire

place & kneel there at another woman’s ashes, scoop

them out into a sugar bowl to take home with you to spread

them on your garden floor, fertile enough for pale

infertile wintertime.  Kneel now with me while I am still

alive & vivid, blessed by a season of high fever, still

whole at the larynx & can speak these things

aloud to you.  For one season I have swept

a city by a storm.  For you, love, my hair is famous

hair, my hands are clean, large & white enough

for harm.  At the throat of November, when the streets

are waxy as the underbellies of awed swans, beseiged

by wet, cremated leaves, an ancient light lights

the season in its ancient repetitions, old song

about the father, the bedeviling, the histories.

Historically, I am insatiable & cannot be beloved hard

enough.  I’m intoxicated, a little whore, lie

now with me while I am still holy like

this: I hid me—as the lice hid all through the spring

of my hair, divine in their guise, invisible

cocoons beating white & more or less white,

their bedeviling, as they hid in their cases

while I slept face down in my hair, white in my bed,

little lamb, an innocent.  I will harm as hard

as I have sealed the ashes in their urn, bold

as a tendon arcked in the lover’s hip as she spreads

her wing—you are impotent, you are wed, I am

thinking of the humpbacked trunk, full

of my things, fifty years from now, the terrible

crystal of what she will find, your precious

one, your lamb.  This is my work.