Portrait of a Hanged Woman

 
The Greeks
had it wrong:
catastrophe
 
is not a downturn,
not a fall
from grace.
 
No, it is
the sudden
terrible
 
elevation of
a single point—
one dot
 
on the topography
of a life. That
is the crux
 
of the punishment:
the singling out,
then that brutal
 
uplifting, so that
everything else
is suspended
 
from that point.
It is as if
a steel clamp
 
had seized upon
one square inch
of a flattened
 
canvas map then
jerked sharply
upwards:
 
the painted landscape
cracking in
unaccustomed
 
creases, cities
thrown into shadow,
torqued bridges
 
twisting free.
A life is not
this supple,
 
it is not meant
to fold, to be 
drawn through
 
a narrow ring.
The Greeks
were wrong.
 
Necessity
is not a weaver,
there is no spindle
 
in her hand;
it is a woman
wearing a steel
 
collar, wearing
a stiffly pleated
dress, which lifts
 
to reveal nothing
but drapery where
her body used to be.
 


Lamentation of the Hanged Man

The minor winds
hemmed all around
 
with little brass hooks
of birdsong.
 
They fasten
on me bonelessly
 
like failed wings.
They tug at me,
 
each with its own
pained sense
 
of imperative.
I am forever
 
turning in the same
idiot arcs, forever
 
facing the white-
lipped sneer
 
of the horizon.
How I would love
 
to flatten myself
against the ground,
 
to stop the small
crying blacknesses
 
of my body with the all-
sufficient blackness
 
of the earth. Even now
a rake of small-toothed
 
howls is dragging
toward us, combing out
 
the hills. If only
I were lying still,
 
pressed to the ground,
I might be taken
 
for part of the earth,
tilled into the soil
 
like any other
enrichment, like labor.