seeing it now

heathen is a stranger,
but she will let you know her

brown-haired girl, needled with dye
beneath her long underwear a birch-
body

stamped with constellations

soaked in woad,
a little bairn,
dreaming, sleeping, songs from
a music-box,

soft green yarn and march hares.

pale and preferring wool,

quite exquisitely hungry:


for something more than clay,
for more fuel than peat provides,
for an all-together new color of
light,


quite exquisitely hungry:


and sick of chewing candlewax
and through with saying, that
in the dark, brackish water


could just as well be beer,

a scrap of paper could be a blanket,
a wall could be a window,
static silence could be love, no,

that isn't so,
that doesn't ring,

and if you haven't even heard
her sing,

have you really known heathen at all?