Punishment

 

I can feel the tug of the halter at the nape,

a raw tenderness the wind licks on her naked front.

I can see her drowned In the bog,

the waterlogged trunk of her,

her drowned body.

It blows her nipples to beads of darkened amber,

it shakes the frail rigging of her young ribs.

I can see her drowned body in the peat,

the weighting stone a cold embrace,

the floating rods and boughs, a bier.

Under which at first she was a lithe sapling roughly barked,

then dug to oak-bone, a brain-firkin:

her shaved head a bruised stubble of black corn,

her blindfold a soiled linen, her noose a stark ring

to store a ghost of vanished love.

Little adulteress, before their brutal justice,

you were flaxen-haired, undernourished,

and your tar-black face held beauty.

My poor scapegoat,

I who have stood In the time of innocent,

As a child off innocence,

I almost love you but would have cast,

I know, the stones of my silence. I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed and darkened combs,

your muscles' fragile webbing and all your numbered bones:

I who stood dumb when your betraying sisters,

cauled in tar's shame, wept by the cold railings,

who would connive in civilized outrage,

yet understand the stark and tribal, intimate revenge.

A Photograph of me

 

It was taken some time ago.

At first it seems to be a snapshot of a woman

a woman in her mid-thirties a smeared print:

blurred lines and grey flecks blended with the paper;

then, as you scan it,

you see in the left-hand corner a thing that is like a branch:

part of a tree (balsam or spruce) emerging and

, to the right, halfway  up what ought to be a gentle slope,

a small frame house. In the background there is a lake,

and beyond that, some low hills.

The photograph was taken the day after I drowned. 

 the woman is me, and I am dead. I am in the lake,

in the center of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where precisely,

or to say how large or small I am:

the effect of water on light is a distortion but if you look long enough,

eventually you will be able to see me.

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