or held her hand above the kettle's snout
right in the woolly steam. They are probably angels,
since nothing hurts her any more, except
each morning's grit blowing into her eyes.
3. Name me a thinking woman who has not slept with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,
that sprung-lidded, still commodious
steamer-trunk of
tempora
and
mores
gets stuffed with it all: the mildewed orange-flowers,
the female pills, the terrible breasts
of Boadicia beneath flat foxes' heads and orchids.
Two handsome women, gripped in argument,
each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream
across the cutglass and majolica
like Furies cornered from their prey:
the argument
ad /eminem,
all
the old knives
that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours,
ma semblable, ma soeur!
4. Knowing themselves too well in one another;
their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,
the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn . . .
Reading while waiting
for the iron to heat,
writing,
"This is the gnat that mangles men"
in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,
or, more often,
iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,
dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.
5. Dulce ridentem, dulce loquentem,
she shaves her legs until they gleam
like petrified mammoth-tusk.
