Her canopy conceals from me the clouds over Port Lligat.

One by one the desert’s drawers are opened

and rifled through, releasing her remains in zeroes

or in vowels that look like them.

 

Suspended in air, sapped of life but saturated

with something more profound, like amber

or the barrier of sound being broken, she grasps the rood.

These are merely self-contained miracles.

 

That sound was heard by those far outside the city,

but for us—gathered around the wide sarcophagus

of her hair, the perfect mound of her flesh—

 

there was no din. Only a noiseless flash.

Then nothing. Then the terrible flowering

of her vanishing.

—Jeremy Glazier

Jeremy Glazier is Associate Professor of English at Ohio Dominican University and, through a grant from the Ohio Arts Council, was a 2012 summer fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.
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Published in the February 8, 2013 issue: View Contents

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