“Note the Wreath of Hair at the Back of Her Head, Which Though Fastened by a Spiral Fillet, Escapes at Last, and Flies Off Loose in a Sweeping Curve”

Water in its ruins I would surely sponge what I could.
But leaving out the differences on Friday there is some sense in that.
General or particular you choose dear I have to sit down a minute
in the wounded operating sound of this breathing.

You say, “Can you look into the eyes of a cornered rat
and listen to its chitter as you pick up a stone
without yourself becoming something small and terrified?”
Today, anyway, let me rest like metal strings softening to the rags

of the clavichord’s bing bung, so reminiscent of musical glasses,
don’t you think, in their “plaintive, disembodied, melancholy” tones?
Yet even if breathing’s a pile in sequence, like rain,
shouldn’t one try to connect up extremes in a mention like sailing

when, suddenly, the mast leans down and gulps salt
water without considering a single person’s feelings?
I have an ache of excellent bits of many things, like a letter
for all the family, also days when no boat approaches to signal

your particular beauty on a background so purely unbreathing.

—Cal Bedient

Cal Bedient is a professor at UCLA and the author of several books of literary criticism and two books of poetry, Candy Necklace and The Violence of the Morning.

Originally published in the summer 2005 issue of Boston Review