From “Critical Opalescence and the Blueness of the Sky”

Shrugging shallowly down, burrowing

in beneath the heaps of plumped cork- and sallow-

brown leaf, beneath the oak and the brittle bean-

dripping locust and the still so innocent fruit

trees—bare-boughed and newly blossoming—skinnily

shadowing the frost-seared grasses, I and my

“now” [in this pictured perfect] four-

year-old daughter, huddled, hidden, lie

low. I remember hiding in the fort

too: bedtimes once how snug among books and the plush

beasts we spoke the speech of angels. Now the world is huge-

ly hushed. The winter sky is hard, kiln-fired

blue. The cherry wood retouched with buds. And small,

untimely flowers like blood-drops on the snow.

Time lapsed. Time dwelt. There was nothing

apparently to those rumors of rescue

or reprisals. Absence only

emptied the mind. The fond heart felt

light—likewise lifted right and justly up

to praise the day as it was to high

heaven. You were a “find”: rare, rose-

lipped, hennaed, ochred, kohled, long black-

stockinged O like one of Schiele’s urewig

girls, flashing a shy semaphore—

spelling eloquently out the f-

word, tenderly revisiting its history.

Lust—like love lost—was the catalyst:

exquisitely expedient, unchanged.