And so I went forth, exhilarated
in uniform: worn-through jeans, muscle tees,
stripped of bras and ancestral history.

It was important on this April night
to open the windows, all of them, east
and on the west, pushing the panes

It was white I wanted —of snow, clouds, of sky overcast, of
       a star if you take the shine from it. Usual
           sound, light, and I wake—but sense a shift

Long after Ovid’s story of Philomela
   has gone out of fashion and after the testimonials
of Hafiz and Keats have been smothered in comment

A woman of wool lies on a couch covered with pale shawls.
The way it holds her, she and the couch are almost one.
Cold fingers the shawls but she is warm. Though gravely ill.

What’s missing is the body, its nakedness wrapped
in marble. What’s missing is the hair, the floating hair
that falls in chalky tendrils. Only the face, huge

Narcissus was finally released, though sentenced
by demonic pardon to wander the ends of earth
searching for her. In southern Arizona, he heard

Five is the sum of this world figured by the senses,
and the tally of the planets to the naked eye,
four directions with one person wandering at the pivot.

Black bars expanding
      over an atomic-yellow ground — feelers retracted —
the monarch lay flat on the street

The ridge road takes the ridgespine every way
It turns. It threads the granite venebrae
And old. wind-dwarfed ponderosas that twist