She says she knows she cannot cross the Styx no pay for the ferryman nailed underneath a stiffened
tongue No time to separate wind from air I say, now the grains of chaff are all already sown, now
the hard rasps of specters at transparent doors. No negative capability. Plague is too tight for beauty
I whisper. Beauty was a tight once-upon party dress. Now it bulges with me in it. Heartbeats hum
at its seams in here and in here. I climb an island’s hills. Nap on its paths under drizzle through the
banyan’s hundred curled arms. In here, under my tired-of-night skin, a different thrum. Sex, under
its cleavage and its hidden molecules. Under its fever I only imagine. I don’t have it. A heat is
layers underneath. Under the skeletal cage, a small animal in it, craze-running on her iron wheel.
Under the tongue where I was urged for the coin that could pay the boatman I choose to ignore.
I’ll no longer know what an island is. A hurricane. A woman. A corpse. Inside the body,
a red chameleon preens. The flowering geranium I refuse to meet. But clean and clean a skin between
its crevices, to match the chameleon. Remember how ticks and centipedes can enter a house? How
some god swiped my name from birth and kept it in his pocket? Underneath his pocket, he’s naked.
What does he do with his nakedness? If I am naked, I am safe, yes? Pure as an infant, wise as a crone,
naked as the day she was hatched. Why did he need my name? Now I need it. The boatman would
swallow it in place of a coin. He won’t kiss me though. Even a boatman can catch the wind—
— why am I—be specific—why am I always the woman who asks how close is death how
near is God? I have no other question. None. No other lens under my one eye. Beauty I owl-
screech, asleep and awake. Beauty. Come for me now. Sheath me, embalm me, love me a little. A
Lethe of hands. Humility? My thanks for inviting me to tea and poison. The cup that passes.
Yet that untaught gift : the presence of surge—