12.

You sang, black Madonna, your breasts more perfect

Than dogma, your lush smile more fertile

Than the Nile, the symmetry of your thought

More astonishing than the pyramids.

Let us compare not geometries but myths

We elaborate from our marrow, the stones

We kick from our shoes, the marvel we find

From that child, the one who peers from your lap

Through a space vaster than time that seems

Close and immediate, and you vanish

Like the woman on the train at New Brunswick

Gorgeous against all injustice and laws.

How can your canvas be flesh, your gaze

From old paint miles away be her, here, these days?