Lorna CrozierP. K.
She saw two moons in the prairie sky.
As a girl, asked if she were cursed
with seeing double, she replied,
Oh, no. If I were, then I’d see four.
In countries with no cold,
snow from her childhood
fell circular and soft
in the glass globe of her inner eye,
dressing the blossoms as if they were brides.
Her only child was the child she dreamed
and folded in a box like a scarf
made out of threads of rain. You could say
she neglected God and his angels,
though the invisible made sense
in all her senses. Heaven she found
in the gaze of a glorious macaw
with the face of Groucho Marx,
and once, with her calm uncanny eye,
as a marmoset in a rage sunk its teeth
in the flesh just above her wrist,
she noticed its fingers
were the stems of violets.
In a poem, at the moment of death,
the poet asked, What is the correct procedure?
Cut the umbilicus, they said.
Now she has cut it and risen like words from a page.
Beneath her, the Earth is the size of a plum
and the blue of a plum when it is ripe with morning.
Is the body still a body, she wonders,
if it is drifting so high? How, then, to prepare it?
Wash it in sacred water, is her own reply.
Dress it in silk for the wedding.
