That first time I saw myself miraculous, we baked swan-fat
into bread when Satan whispered, “I can’t think of anything
that can make me smile like you can and although you are perfect
you have come too early and are here where something laughing
will be shaped deliberately, ball of a palm pressed into moist clay.”
I thought Andersen carved white and angular again, like the sons
of twilight or luminous alabaster wrought with finest blade,
too beautiful to contemplate unless revised as Satan by the blender
with the custard, and maybe I’ve left of him a lovely bastard
who, cloud-headed and too delicate rests a forehead on my wrist
and whose wings are flimsy. But this is different, this will last
and so she lives the phrase, “the garden well is there for drowning”
but I have loved him in the grottos, have seen green chips beneath
sprays of jade and have stayed to soak blood into linen strips,
to rinse them with the bandages. Later, he will pull one feathered rib
from three, (“and when your hands can scarcely dig, I will be near you”)
will scoop stones enough for a face where she would lay herself
to wait, to say, “I can’t think of anything that can make me—”