" Apprenticeship "
Jo shares her flowing cracks
with worms, grubs
inside stone logs, marble
columns; pragmatic places.
Her father once rummaged here
with his snuffling nose, ursine
tongue, tore the cold flesh,
clawed spiked trails.
The sculptor's apprentice lays a cheek
on the cylinder, feels her breath:
the frequency of cavern water.
His chisel sloughs off dead skin,
liberates flakes of regret.
Her voice seeps why do you love
broken women. He gives her his best
dour face, does not speak.
Steel finds some of her curves
amidst the porous grain, but the piece
is too narrow: room for one breast, half
of the other, a single curved arm
opposite a collar bone that suggests
a shoulder. He exposes the left hip,
slims the leg to high-arched foot,
brings the right calf in from oblivion
below the imagined knee. Rasp, file,
polish away the dust, give both feet
a gentle pedicure. Stone veins throb,
yet she hides; the sarcophagus remains shut.
He cannot find all of the pieces,
her father has taken them to the tomb.
He covers her face, torso
with gray canvas, stores her away.
The sculptor returns often to Jo, rolls
back her cover, strokes the perfect
perspiration of light. Now he can make
blood flow through imagination,
make white eyes go liquid brown.
He knows she would not survive
the fall from a cliff--she still
does not know how to wish.
© 2004 Steve Williams
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