She Imagines Herself a Figure Upon Them

      A wrong look into heavy stone
       And twilight, wove my body,
 And I was snowing with the withering hiss of thread.
                My head was last, and with it came
      An eyesight needle-pointing like a thorn-bush.
I came to pass
                           slant-lit, Heaven-keeping with the rest
Of the museum, causing History to hang clear of earth
 With me in it, carded and blazing.    Rigidly, I swayed

  Among those morningless strings, like stained glass
           Avertedly yearning:    here a tree    a Lord
                   There a falcon on fist    and eagle
                   Worried into cloud, strained up
   On gagging filaments    there a compacted antelope
         With such apparent motion stitched to death
                 That God would pluck His image
             Clean of feathers if I leapt    or breathed
Over the smothered plain:
                                          the Past, hung up like beast-hides,
                                 Half-eaten, half-stolen,
                    Not enough.
                                             Well, I was not for it:
                         I stubborned in that lost wall
    Of over-worked dust, and came away
                                                               in high wind,
                                  Rattling and flaring
             On the lodge-pole craze and flutter of the sail,
                     Confounding, slatting and flocking,
On-going with manhandled drift, wide-open in the lightning’s

           Re-emphasizing split, the sea’s holy no-win roar.
                        I took the right pose coming off
                 The air, and of a wild and ghostly battering
                            Was born, and signed-on
                                                                    and now steady down
                  To movement, to the cloth’s relationless flurries,
                 Sparring for recovery    feather-battling    lulling,

                           Tautening and resolving, dwelling slowly.