From
Erosion
:
SAN SEPOLCRO
Jorie Graham
. . . . How clean the mind is,
holy grave. It is this girl by Piero della Francesca, unbuttoning her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
to go into labor. Come, we can go in.
It is before the birth of god. No-one has risen yet to the museums, to the assembly line bodies and wings to the open air market. This is what the living do: go in.
It's a long way.
And the dress keeps opening from eternity to privacy, quickening.
Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath is a button coming undone, something terribly nimble-fingered finding all of the stops.
grew up in Italy and now lives in northern California.She has received grants from the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.Her first book,
Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts
(Princeton, 1980), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award as the best first book of poems published in 1980.