any memory once engraved
on the twin
chromosome ribbons, emerge, tentative
from the archaeology of an excised past.
I am a woman
who understands
the necessity of an impulse whose goal or origin
still lie beyond me. I keep the goat
for more
than the pastoral reasons. I work
in silver the tongue-like forms
that curve round a throat
an arm-pit, the upper
thigh, whos significance stirs in me
like a curviform alphabet
that defies
decoding, appears
to consist of vowels, beginning with O, the O-
mega, horseshoe, the cave of sound.
What tiny fragments
survive, mangled into our language.
I am a woman committed to
a politics
of transliteration, the methodology
of a mind
stunned at the suddenly
possible shifts of meaning--for which
like amnesiacs
in a ward on fire, we must
find words
or burn.