Our Lady of the Ruins

Somniloquy

In the end, everything matters,
even rain on the hills, though it won't
save a splintered boat from sundering

or release the shark in the net.
Bathing my sick child in milk couldn't
calm her fever. Nailing myself to a tree

didn't bring God any closer,
but when I looked a serpent in the eyes
I felt a common salvation.

The day after I buried my daughterI heard a knocking and opened a drawerto find a dozen eggs, one of them rocking.I held it in my mouth. Two snakes brokefrom the shell and licked my neck. The godhanging on the wall commanded, Watch me suffer.

I dreamt my daughter dove
for whale bones on the abyssal plains,
surfaced from the seafloor bearing

spines, ribs, colossal skulls.
They grinned at me from the waves,
gods of a different history.

Two days after I buried my daughterI began to understand I was promiseda second life but not a better one. I hired mourners who wept and rent their clothesby the river, but visions still pursued me.I paid a woman to baptize herself in my name, to tell me when she changed. She disappearedbut left behind a white dress and three teeth. A woman's body is a memory with no language.

I dreamt my daughter by the side of the road
circled by thirteen dead owls. I knew it
would end here in the cat's cradle of my heart,

in my witch's little finger, but my daughter said,
Be still. It has not been decided whether you will dieon this dark continent or the next.

*

Three days after I buried my daughter,
I found a man in a field holding the soft, gray
loops of his intestines in his hands like evidence

of life, but not proof. I killed the bull
that gored him, stitched its head
onto the dead man's body. When I saw

what I had made, I kissed its nipples,
drank there until I was strong enough
to brush the flies from my breasts.