1
 
A glare from her platformed body keeps the children near. 
 
Any moment she could awake to feel my breath fogging up her imaginary glass dome that maintains the desired humidity for optimal preservation. 
 
2
 
What we did not see before is that she is not lacking the look of prayer, but the look of faith. 
 
She knows how to recite the names of saints, the children songs, but with her back to the row of windows filtering a natural light into the room she does not know if she believes in wonder.
 
3
 
Without touching the base of her statue I hide from the crowds behind the skirt of her drape, a petal hardened by too much light.
 
A single orchid inside the orchidarium, she is stationed to her symbolic pose:
 
the myth, the flower, the fruit, the goddess, the offering, the wisdom.
 
4
 
The brighter she appears the more distant from the other torsos. If I prayed to live forever, I may or may not be in the right place.
 
5
 
Because the female’s desire for solitude is louder than my wish, she pushes me away like a priest smearing ashes across my forehead to send me home to the children I may or may not bear.
 
6
 
But we cannot return to our mothers once we have left home.
 
We are not the same children and she is an early Cycladic statue, a folded-arm-type without her full arm-span. How can she, sculpted before the birth of Christ, shake solace into our hands without hands? 
 
I gravitate towards her suspended body because I have yet to view the horses in flying gallop, statues whose feet do not touch the ground.