i.

Not to go backward,

   not to watch the women

peddling in reverse past the church,

      the priest in his black habit

  receding from the chapel door.

Not to go backward,

   the bones of August

becoming the bones of March,

      branch of dogwood

  picked clean by frost.

Not to say Yes

   when asked the question

all women wait to hear,

       Are you anything

  like your mother?

Not to be photographed in her dress

   like a saint

carrying the instrument of her martyrdom,

      Agnes, and her try

  of breasts—

or to throw the bouquet into the grave

    where Bartholomew hides

with his bloody knife.

       Not to burn

  half the house down—

and build half the house up.

   Not to forgive

the bad child

      when even the bad house

  is forgiven. Not to care,

not to carry the bones of August

    into September, foiled with redness

and nothing to squander

      but the buds of spring

   dormant in their boughs.

Not to ask, Did you

   love her? and leave

the answer in the ground,

      where everything difficult

  is buried.

  ii.

Attend the dead,

   then welcome the bride—

backward, as Jews do,

      reading Hebrew,

  right to left.

First the mourning,

  then the celebration.

Backward, taking off

      the beautiful face

  of forgetting,

two names with the same face—

  all this time

a woman waiting inside me

      to marry.

   Invisible, impermanent,

windmill girl in her cage

   of breath,

insect girl in her element:

      impenetrable shell,

  putting on

the beautiful face of forgetting—

    Fury   Sybil  Isis

one of us

       wakes in her

  graveyard of guilt,

filamentary as fiber optics,

   one of us sleeps on

in the temple, lulled

       by the metronomic

  pulse of longing—

Did you love her? Are you anything?

    That other girls is dead.

That other girl is dead.

      What else can be said

   about that other girl?

  iii.

Same as mine,

  skin of her hands

laid over the ivory bones,

       dark map

  of the body—  Yes—

it was dark,

  but I was darker

on the inside.

      When she was young

  she was "a great beauty,"

in the same sense

  that "a roomful of adults"

is rarely ever.

      I was never

  like her, flattered

like a map

   under glass,

slender as an axle

      in a turbine—

  enigma relic:

feet of steel, legs of wood,

   cabinet of curiosity.

Even her reflection

       in a spoon

  was beautiful.

  iv.

Labor into longing:

   wild enthusiasm

of the dynamo engine

      working in reverse—

  more power

in the leaf of a flower

  than the paw of a bear.

Is it necessary

      to remember

  absolutely everything?

Golden hour on the birch—

  brailled bark,

weathered barn stacked

      with malignant logs,

  sweet mulch

of aether /ore

   in the morning air.

We hung drapes

       over the mirrors,

  they were flowered, too—

her bouquet a cabbage,

   assembled by a florist

from 120 roses

      Incandescent light

  flattened their petals,

made lace of their thorns.

  Uncanny—nothing in nature

so rigid,

     nothing more harmful

  than her rare affection.

  v.

August: honeymoon at Niagara,

   water shut off—

bad luck.

      Two bodies,

  a man's and a woman's

found face-

   down in the mud

at the bottom of the gorge.

      Neglected

  on the cliffs above,

Tesla's alternating current station,

    powerless

in its pure machinery,

      honeyed, lunar magnets

  waiting in their sockets

for the current to resume.

   Enough about friction:

this is about two bodies

      at the end of America,

  repelling each other

under the polar rush of water,

  generating their own distance

over time. Is it history

      or home

  that hurts us more?

Did she look into the gorge

    as into his face

when she said Yes—

      to see the downpour,

   even when it was damned?

  vi.

Nothing in me wasted,

   a use for grief, even.

I wore it on my left hand.

       I was married to it.

  I planted myself

in the dirt:

  alphabets grew up

from the bones of my feet.

      I drowned my heart

  in the lake.

Black hole, such vanity—

   navigating the ear canals

like so many gondoliers

      trolling the watery streets

   looking for someone

to sing to. Beautiful

   fisherman who fished

my heart out of its lake—

      I did not die. I revived.

  I wore her face on my fingers

when I dug up my joy

   up from the ground, singing:

Oh wooden coffin, woman's body,

      boulder at home

  in its stone skin.

  vii.

Yes, then, to all of it: to the drowned

    sea urchins, porcupines spined,

and the black-brain

      coral that sleeps

   on the ocean's floor,

ruinously blue. Yes

   to the vultures that roost

above the waterfall,

       that don't

  surrender their nests

at our dissolution,

  and to the bones that do.

To remember is to open

      one door

  after another

all along

  the white corridor

to say Yes when asked,

       Are you anything?

  Did she love you?

To go forward

    is to surrender

the necklace of tears she gave me—

      this failed body

  with my name on it.