Her Poem

I

The poem is all hers. It begins

with questions: how did she arrive

at this strange place that for thirty

years had always looked like home?

Is her affliction a disease long

undetected or a sudden wound?

She grows thin, sleeps little, her eyes

darken to see ghosts everywhere.

She becomes her own desperate detective,

searching out his car, empty

and still as death, in the woman's driveway.

(No ghost, this, the poem concedes.)

u

Her door cheeps open like a bird

troubled in its nest. He is home.

His false kiss betrays in her a mob

of armed agonies she never knew were there.

This man whose grazing sleeve was enough

to cure all ills goes numb as ice.

Priests of her soul sit hunched around her,

hands on knees like limp clichés.

In the same instant she and the poem

understand: only this Judas,

this familiar stranger, can heal her now.

The one lover she needs is her betrayer.

m

The poem lowers her in a pool of sleep

and there her love is squeezed from her flesh

in a chain of pointed stones. Where

is her Iscariot? Will he kiss her blood?

Winter dawdles. Will spring ever come?

she asks the poem, waking. Will spring

bring back nothing but this: at midday

a mock lover reeling with moonlight?

IV

The earth rolls over on its back

inviting love. The poem points to where

her lover comes weighted with his flagon

of repentant wine. He pours it over

her nakedness, brow to toe, gently,

like one expensive caress without

a seam. Her silk of woman skin

drinks dry his art of hands, of lips.

(An art new-learned of the other woman?)

Hush, the poem whispers. It will

teach her how to wash the blood

from his wine, slowly, kiss by kiss.

Around his head and loins she feels

tingling halos of the absolution

which her body begs her to give.

But love yearns faster than heart can beat to.

v

The priestess cries out from her suffocating

confessional of tears: you're not yet clean

of me. Forgive my incomplete forgiveness

until my clotted spirit drains and heals.

The poem nods to her imperfect

lover who now takes her, shivering,

into his arms. Nightlong he holds

her warm, the poem keeping watch.