There were gestures I could not imitate.
I viewed a photo of a marble statue. I traveled
to view the statue itself. The white fingers indented
the white thigh. The impossible ravishing of gods.
I touched my own thigh, as if what I learned might enter.
But how could I. Why would I want. How an opening
in the solid rock of the perishable body.
How stumbling into the garden in the piercing noon
and this vision. If only I stood for the ground
it stands on, I could overturn. I was a quiet girl/
I was a noisy girl/I was always in trouble/
once I had to go to jail/I was never a sinuous carving/
I was always a bag of hair/no one taught me/
my teachers were unschooled/it was going to be over
soon/all right/like a cardboard box jammed sideways
in a mailbox/a sword leaning against a marble
thigh/my own thigh peeled open to victim meat.
I the forever clumsy messenger left to crawl from the garden
because marble cannot escape. That’s the old excuse.
I am remembering now, I followed a map.
At this juncture in the myth of pleasure, the knives step up
to the dance. Sunglasses on the skull/analog/
time confusion that points toward a story of falling.
Teach me, empty plate. Teach me, knife and fork.
What will I want when the weight of an arm crosses me?
I was learning to pass my palms across stone
and knotted silk when I began to hunger for flight
or battle. A shadow raised its arms, I raised mine/a statue
tumbled from its pedestal, I pushed it over/
we were less than human, we strove only to win.
Our warring voices could be heard across miles of garden.
I wanted to shout about time, I wanted to count until the end,
and it would rain before we got there, umbrellas
floating above. A flock. The guarded future.
Lisa Lewis has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Taxonomy of the Missing (WordWorks 2018) and a chapbook, The Borrowing Days (Emrys 2021). A ninth collection, Present and Future Storm, is forthcoming from WordWorks. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Dialogist, Action, Spectacle, Free State Review, Puerto del Sol, Clackamas Literary Review, Florida Review, New Letters, and elsewhere. She teaches in the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as editor-in-chief of the Cimarron Review.
Image: “Enclosures (Rodin’s Pygmalion and Galatea at The Met)” by Alex J. Tunney
