Iowa Review, April 1st, 2006
Who can say what the silence said
to Madam Zero-that's what the other
patients called her-I am dead,
she claimed, and yet I live forever.
Live, the way a fugitive lives
in a strange land, the mother tongue
a childhood music that leaves
a little more each night, each dawn.
And what could touch her, I ask,
she who lay like black on black
water, what pried her from the lake
of her bed, peeled her like a mask.
She saw her image everywhere
as the thing that was missing,
the eye in the stone, the sleeper's stare,
the clock's dice clicking in its fist.
She was the hunger of the cloud ...
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