To the Cardinal, Attacking His Reflection in the Window, and: Narration, Transubstantiation

To the Cardinal, Attacking His Reflection in the Window

"It is your very self," I tell him.He has never seen me.

His quick coin of breath disappears on the glass as it forms: airthat feeds his bones their portion

willingly as it feeds mine. He spends his here,besieged by the dull birds who gather

and whom he cannot touch, his own feathersred as wrought blood.

Fear tears him like silk down the middle.The double helix splits.

Dear bird, how many selvesmust you vanquish?

In the mornings, his wings are backlit. They are beating,delicate, crucifix, hollow feather, hollow bone.

In the blizzard his furor is the only color,the only shape. He is waiting

for the coward to come out. There is nothingall winter he has saved to eat.

I saw a female the day beforehe disappeared. Her beak just as orange, her body,

calm, watched his. I made voices for her:variations on the pride and hemmed patience of women

I'd known whose husbands did insistent, strong,and strange things. Maybe she knew it was spring. I didn't.

The next day he came onceto throw the bright dime of his life to the walled world,

as if to make sureit was not feather against feather that hurt him.

Narration, Transubstantiation

God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.

—Jorge Luis Borges

1

The peony, which was not open this morning, has opened,falling over its edges

like the circumference of God, still claspedat the center:

my two-month old daughter's handin Palmer reflex, having endured

from the apes: ontogenyrecapitulating phylogeny, clutching for fur.

Her face is always tilted up when I carry her,her eyes, always blue.

She is asking nothing of the sky, nothingof the pileated woodpeckers,

their directionless wings, directed bodies,the unmoved moving.

2

Hold still,song of the wood thrush,

twin voice boxes poised, smell of the creekand the locust flowers, white as wafers

on the branches, communion: pistil, stamen, bee.Hold still.

She doesn't saya word.

3

When we eat,what we eat is the body

of the world.Also when we do not eat.

She is asking the sky for milk.Take and eat, we tell her,

this is my bodywhich is given for you, child,

who are here now,though you were not,

though you will be oldthen absent again: sad

to us going forward in timebut not back. Not sad to you at all.

The peony whose circumferenceis nowhere, you, whose head

now is weighted to my chest,the creek stringing lights

along next to us,the peony which has opened.