This is worship, one could say, as pure as white
sheets in the sun, though there is no sun now.

Before I bathed him, the dirt was so dense
that for all it was a second, firmer skin.
Boys as we know them do not have second skins.

The female should always be secret, you said.
Women, like figs—rotten
when open.

But this is not the field the soldiers took with so few losses.
   Prophets never stop
beside the well sprung from the garden hose. A snake has

Adam and Eve preferred the Tree of Good
and Evil to the fruits of infinity,
says Edward Dahlberg. Gustav Janouch observes

Everything springs from nothing, then is thrust,
face forward, to infinity, declared
Pascal. To get to know the infinite,

What will be the last book
I read? Woolf s finest work,
the only one I shunned?

—Yes, my friend, making my grave rounds. Our mother’s there,
my brother too, and the wife’s niece, buried last year,
   only seventeen, leukemia, it seems. And you, sir?

You spoiled something back there at the beginning,
a vowel, a syllable, a word,
and the poem’s inedible now,

You think me evil? I think so of you.
Before you captured me I was the queen
of Goths, and there I was no lady, but