A Woman Without A Country

As dawn breaks he enters

A room with the odor of acid.

He lays the copper plate on the table.

And reaches for the shaft of the burin.

Dublin wakes to horses and rain.

Street hawkers call.

All the news is famine and famine.

The flat graver, the round graver,

The angle tint tool wait for him.

He bends to his work and begins.

He starts with the head, cutting in

To the line of the cheek, finding

The slope of the skull, incising

The shape of a face that becomes

A foundry of shadows, rendering —

With a deeper cut into copper —

The whole woman as a skeleton,

The rags of  her skirt, her wrist

In a bony line forever

                                        severing

Her body from its native air until

She is ready for the page,

For the street vendor, for

A new inventory which now

To loss and to laissez-faire adds

The odor of acid and the little,

Pitiless tragedy of  being imagined.

He puts his tools away,

One by one; lays them out carefully

On the deal table, his work done.