Under tapestry (the porch lights out) unworthy
clientele address her. They hunt the wide
stitch, bear representative images: to measure,
burn, and sieve.
In the candle’s white sanctuary
a baby soothed to sleep.
No sacrificial lock is
scissored from its head, no soft doll of curls to cry
‘dulcimer!…bird!’ The sea gives nothing back
to the strand of beach.
And elsewhere the story is less clear. As when St.
Berenice, for love of her husband, gave her hair
in Alexandria, snatched in a perfume of cloven
flowers, wind-driven, flooded with the freckled
silver of her starry hair.
Proscribed upon the zodiac she fashions out of light
an ear of corn. Drop to one’s knees so that she
is haloed by the high, the blue of a Mediterranean
night, counter-clockwise swastika of pricklights
burning, collapsing to an ashen route of shooting stars.
Centaurs move in the dust-rich colors, from darkness
casting up their eyes.