We Think We Do Not Have Medieval Eyes, and: During the Mammogram I Close My Eyes

We Think We Do Not Have Medieval Eyes

Many are working to scrape Chartres' high windowsof their scalelike soot.It's hard to match, in this dimness, the picturesI've held in my mind with what they arepictures of. Hard to seeunder its glass case, this veil—some bone-colored, disintegrating sheerness.

Once, it saved this city. Once, with armored invadersclosing in—someone uncasedit—the realveil under which the Virgingave hot birth—carried it to the high wall of the city to waveits milky shapeliness

until the army, understanding, turned around interror of it.I love this story,the cool wind moving through this lightcloth, warriors runningfrom the slightest possibility of birth-scent—the veil like a glint of artic icethat cools and holds back the rising water.

And I have sailed the seas to come here, meaningI have flown over the rising sea tobe closer to my idea of here. I look up at the stained glass—its Madonna looks to mebenevolent.

Inside the glass panels of her window she floatsin the icy blue restored to her as light

falls burnt-orange through her feet.

Once an angry silver cross hungfrom my mother's neck.When she was dying she knewher limbs would go firstso she kept asking me to check her

feet. I pressed my palmsto her high arches. Yes, cold, I said,but didn't pull them into my lap, didn'thold them.

Her feet went cold under the sheet,then the rest of her.

Now I hold them in my mind like an amulet.

What is what to what.What am I doing in the dumb lovely feel of this light

as it falls through this Madonnaas it falls through the sea's darkening blues

blues so dark now they can't reflectthis light the ice was oncearmor to.

During the Mammogram I Close My Eyes

And see a caravan …

Onto the cool plastic, I lift my right breast. It was my mother's right breastwhere her dying started. Don't, I mutter to myself, don't be

—what? A woman like my mother, always afraid,

wandering the house at night, checking to make sure the doors were locked.Just go to sleep already, I'd say, finding her up, crazed with awakeness, her hairpointing everywhere. No one is coming for you.

As if I didn't know the dreams that came for her.

The nurse says stand closer.I close my eyes & see a caravan—

a what? a caravan so large I cannot see the shape of it, the end of it, but feel itsmarch inside my—

The machine revs up, comes down

to flatten. I close my eyes & seecaravans, yes, of Kavanaughs

coming for me, a drumbeat of Kavanaughs, an installment plan ofKavanaughs, seas of Kavanaughs, the smooth jaws of Kavanaughs, abroadband of laws of Kavanaughs, a caravan of panel vans of Kavanaughscoming for me, a Tarzan of Peter Pan of Kellyanne of Kavanaguhs, a quicksandof Kavanaughs, a Dada of Kavanaughs saluting Kavanaughs as if it were onlythe dawn of Kavanaughs—

Mother, I am trying to think.

Mother, lost to dream, what is in me

I did not put there.

I cannot see there.

I feel it making its pictures.