The Handmaid's Song

     The Handmaid’s Song
 
 
     life is a filament of marrow and cracked lapis
 
     honeybees fill my mouth with gold
     my throat
     with venom
 
     my bones are windows that seldom show the moon
 
     in a sternum-keeled cage a crocodile
     swallows the Nile—
     its gullet a silk-colored flower
 
     both the milk snake and the asp nurse at my breast
 
     I prepare pharaoh’s

     bath with natron, with sand soap,

     with almond and ibex fat
     I polish his skin—glossed as jewel beetles
 
     with clever hands I pleat byssus fine as locust wings
 
     in my abdomen a door, hingeless,
     opens on darklit rivers—
     starry fish
 
     the scraped cradle of my womb—rich only with figs, honey
 
     within my walls scarlet ibis
     lift wings, scarabs
     burrow
 
     smallish winds in my wristbones whisper deceits
 
     my thighs, Egyptian palms
     rooted
     in river delta
 
     my days:  a chaos of kohl, quails and goat skin
 
     beneath sarcophagal dome
     canopic jars—
     eye shutter, tooth rattle
 
     I am salt:
 
             grit and glitter  

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