San Sepolcro

By Jorie Graham
In this blue light
       I can take you there,
snow having made me
       a world of bone   
seen through to. This
       is my house,

my section of Etruscan
       wall, my neighbor’s   
lemontrees, and, just below
       the lower church,   
the airplane factory.
       A rooster

crows all day from mist
       outside the walls.   
There’s milk on the air,
       ice on the oily
lemonskins. How clean   
       the mind is,

holy grave. It is this girl
       by Piero
della Francesca, unbuttoning   
       her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
       to go into

labor. Come, we can go in.   
       It is before
the birth of god. No one
       has risen yet
to the museums, to the assembly   
       line—bodies

and wings—to the open air
       market. This is
what the living do: go in.
       It’s a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
       from eternity

to privacy, quickening.
       Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment   
       forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
       is a button

coming undone, something terribly   
       nimble-fingered   
finding all of the stops.

Jorie Graham, “San Sepolcro” from The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994. Copyright © 1995 by Jorie Graham. Used with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1995)