Isis Prepares for Resurrection
- Isis Prepares for Resurrection
your touch doesn’t feel my flesh but finds my bracelet instead a ring of nehessi copper turning my wrist green like an old woman’s arthritic arm verdant from too much copper
you draw moonlight towards you curling sea brass etched with platinum scars the eye of the ankh an anaconda’s coil a chorus of life and death I whisper it is just
a bracelet but your eyes are far from ornamental you have trekked the distance orbitted earth and your ears understand the chained circumference of my upturned palm
this dawn with both wrists naked we alone touch a copper band its pattern like some faint fertility symbol breath echoing at the source of our hand we are singing
tenné to draw poison out copper to extract a name I will travel centuries to kiss your eyes but cast this arc instead an alchemical fusion of distance part covenant part bone
Nehassaiu De Gannes, a graduate of McGill University in Montreal, received the M.A. degree from Temple University. Currently, she teaches English at the Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island. During the 1996 fall term, she will enter the Creative Writing Program at Brown University. Her poems in this issue of Callaloo are her first print publications. A member of the Dark Room Collective, she was born in Trinidad.
