Imagined Corners
At the corner where the transept cuts the nave,
bird’s-eye architecture mirrors the still cross-
section of a cross; and who’s to say it wouldn’t
look that way, if dissected—row upon row
of sitting, sitting, then rising or kneeling
in the litany’s slender choreographies?
They also serve who only stand and wait, Milton
cautioned from the dark. My watch has
stopped at eternal ten past nine, and I’m
thinking again of a woman with lupus, another
with MS: two letters tattoo an anatomy’s
watch-springs. And then there’s the transverse
cut of the ovary: botanical eggs that dilate in glass,
as the model tibouchina, glory-bush, perhaps:
the cinquefoil glitters its five white polyps,
or some see a waving skull on a stem.
