After you've been dead for awhile you learn
the trick of it, fickle as sand, as one
day at a time the unprophetic word
determines who its echo and that self
become a knowable and waiting chance
for seeming;
and fingers forgetting though
each skull or stanza its own history
if once in like time and could again
where is, a certain Slant of light--
oppresses--
or whose builded shadow now
to probe with howsoever delicate
a touch the startles caught and curious
containing of her rhythmic synapses
these hundred years and so, the woman plain.
