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Her hand is at the feedbag at her waist, sunk to the wrist in the rustling grain that nuzzles her fingertips when laced around a sifting handful. It’s like rain, like cupping water in your hand, she thinks, the cracks between the fingers like a sieve, except that less escapes you through the chinks when handling grain. She likes to feel it give beneath her hand’s slow plummet, and the smell, so rich a fragrance she has never quite got used to it, under the seeming spell of the charm of the commonplace. The white hens bunch and strut, heads cocked, with tilted eyes, till her hand sweeps out and the small grain flies.

The shed        behind the barn behind the red cottage I wait for her in the fescue grass the rye        I hear it grow over me Wait for my friends in the distance        on fire their full heads of rust (I love how the clothing drips off them I hear myself say) If the beekeeper doesn’t        come chasing behind with a hatchet I’ll wait behind Cobb’s barn        watching the distant houses She will come down this road        my shadow is paving for her a stalk of honey        and the rye grass grows from her arms (She was raised in these hills        looking down on Elk Creek) and behind her the bluegrass        it’s reaching to touch her ankle

"The Woman of Progressive Intellect (Intellectural), 1914," by August Sander If it were not for her enlightened eyes, She’d be the witch that intellect denies Has ever walked the earth: the sunken jaw, The blunt chin like a claw-toothed hammer’s claw, The stubbed and crooking finger, and the skin As stained and crinkly as her crinoline, Would make a loving grandchild run away. It takes another kind of love to see How spirit, in its tactical withdrawal From aging outworks that are doomed to fall, Consents to the bewitching of its shell As long as it can hold the citadel Where the progressive intellect has spent A lifetime plotting the enlightenment The backward and the beautiful dismiss As mind’s revenge for its unloveliness.

Is it peace, Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds On the dump? —Wallace Stevens Out of the cracks of cups and their handles, missing, the leaves unceremoniously tossed, unread, from a stubble of coffee ground ever more finely into these hollowed grounds, the first shift coaxes bulldozers to life, sphinxes to tease the riddled rubble into fresh pyramids of rot. A staleness warms enough to waft round the lord of all purveyed. His to count the hauls past the yawning gates of this New Giza into the Middle Kingdom’s Late Intermediate Period. There, to purify, to honor ourselves, we beg these offerings of refuse be cast out. To the archaeologist of the far-flung future, enough evidence in the inscriptions to identify most owners: spells scratched on the backs of envelopes to be read out before animal sacrifice, the milk, ground meat, beer, and soap joined in this hereafter with the feast’s remains. Over tomatoes splitting their sides, over a teacup stained with roses flattened into mosaic petal from petal, earthmovers move a little mountain and, having moved it, move on, overturning a diamond sprung from its ring, glitter to a magpie’s covetous eye. If the art of loneliness is landscape, armload by carload of black-bagged leaves, landfill contours its likeness.

Now thou has loved me one whole day, Tomorrow when you leav’st, what wilt thou say? Wilt thou then antedate some new-made vow? Or say that now We are not just those persons which we were? Or, that oaths made in reverential fear Of Love, and his wrath, any may forswear? Or, as true deaths true marriages untie, So lovers’ contracts, images of those, Bind but till sleep, death’s image, them unloose? Or, your own end to justify, For having purposed change and falsehood, you Can have no way but falsehood to be true? Vain lunatic, against these ‘scapes I could Dispute and conquer, if I would, Which I abstain to do, For by tomorrow, I may think so too.

A woman’s looks Are barbed hooks, That catch by art The strongest heart, When yet they spend no breath. But let them speak, And sighing break Forth into tears, Their words are spears That wound our souls to death. The rarest wit Is made forget, And like a child Is oft beguiled With Love’s sweet-seeming bait. Love with his rod So like a god Commands the mind We cannot find, Fair shows hide foul deceit. Time, that all things In order brings, Hath taught me now To be more slow In giving faith to speech: Since women’s words No truth affords, And when they kiss They think by this Us men to overreach.

It is her right, to bind with warmest ties, The lordly spirit of aspiring man, Making his home an earthly paradise, Rich in all joys allotted to life’s span; Twining around each fibre of his heart, With all the gentle influence of love’s might, Seeking no joy wherein he has no part – This is undoubtedly – a woman’s right! It is her right to teach the infant mind, Training it ever upward in its course, To root out evil passions that would bind The upward current of his reason’s force; To lead the erring spirit gently back, When it has sunk in gloom of deepest night; To point the shining path of virtue’s track, And urge him forward. This is woman’s right. It is her right to soothe the couch of pain; There her pure mission upon earth to prove, To calm with gentle care the frenzied brain, And keep her vigil there of holiest love; To watch untiring by the lonely bed, Through the bright day, and in the solemn night, ’Til health ensues, or the loved form is laid To rest for ever. This is woman’s right. She is a flower that blossoms best, unseen, Sheltered within the precincts of her home; There, should no dark’ning storm-cloud intervene, There, the loud-strife of worldlings never come. Let her not scorn to act a woman’s part, Nor strive to cope with manhood in its might, But lay this maxim closely to her heart – That that which God ordains is surely right.

Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind. I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus where the restless oceans pound. I do not dwell within my birth nor my divinities who am ageless and half-grown and still seeking my sisters witches in Dahomey wear me inside their coiled cloths as our mother did mourning. I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic and the noon's new fury with all your wide futures promised I am woman and not white.

Lightning hits the roof, shoves the knife, darkness, deep in the walls. They bleed light all over us and your face, the fan, folds up, so I won’t see how afraid to be with me you are. We don’t mix, even in bed, where we keep ending up. There’s no need to hide it: you’re snow, I’m coal, I’ve got the scars to prove it. But open your mouth, I’ll give you a taste of black you won’t forget. For a while, I’ll let it make you strong, make your heart lion, then I’ll take it back.

I am not born as yet, five minutes before my birth. I can still go back into my unbirth. Now it’s ten minutes before, now, it’s one hour before birth. I go back, I run into my minus life. I walk through my unbirth as in a tunnel with bizarre perspectives. Ten years before, a hundred and fifty years before, I walk, my steps thump, a fantastic journey through epochs in which there was no me. How long is my minus life, nonexistence so much resembles immortality. Here is Romanticism, where I could have been a spinster, Here is the Renaissance, where I would have been an ugly and unloved wife of an evil husband, The Middle Ages, where I would have carried water in a tavern. I walk still further, what an echo, my steps thump through my minus life, through the reverse of life. I reach Adam and Eve, nothing is seen anymore, it’s dark. Now my nonexistence dies already with the trite death of mathematical fiction. As trite as the death of my existence would have been had I been really born.