Anatomical Angel

Unfastened avidly from each ivory button

               of her spine, the voluntary muscles open

virtuosities of red: Cinnabar

                                    the mutagen, and carmine from cochineal

               born between fog and frost, so many little

deaths Buddhists refuse to wear

                                    robes soaked in its thousands. Sunsets

               of other centuries fade in galleries to ash.

Red is fugitive: As the voice, the blow

                                    of gravity along a nerve opening to an ache

               the body can’t unhouse: As the carnation

suffusing cheek and haunch like saucers

                                    from the king’s porcelain rinsed in candlelight.

               Gratuitous as the curl, the urn-shaped torso,

the pensive, brimming gaze of pretty

                                    post-coital thought she half-turns over one

               excavated shoulder. As if to see herself

in a mirror’s savage theater as elegy

                                    to the attempt to fill an exhausted form,

               to learn again the old ordeals of wound

and hand and eye. To find the source of burning.