Two Poems
by K. Ursula LaCroix
Puzzle
498 pieces & Mary Magdalene's missing
her feet, spread over a table
in glossy-coated cardboard, star-shaped
pieces of her thighs
interlocking, white &
grainy like asters
after a night rain
& all night how easy
to imagine those feet, two
pale buds, & how easy to
avoid the sopping mess
left behind by the horse thieves,
the penitents—easy to gather her
hair in fistfuls & at & at my breast,
to believe in the Champs-Elysees
drunk on its own perfumes, the
throngs of people flowering the street,
joining in.
How easy to carry these pieces
in your front pocket, waiting
for absolution
in a netted yellow night
only the moon
expecting the disasters of morning.
Strategies for the Living
for John
I am choosing to breathe beneath the gills
again, between scales and ribs, like the trout
you taught me to spear, their pierced bellies
the silver beads on an abacus already counting
us out. Or your hands that slip through
the undersides for something sewn deeper,
and the stuttering visits at night that wake me
before I'm finished telling you that this
is how I bring you back.
On a front porch in Kittery, Maine I am deciding
which constellations make sense, if the white
sliver of Centaurus is enough, and supposing the fish
had their own incantation—
Breathe. Undo. Admit nothing.
K. Ursula LaCroix lives in Florence, Arizona and teaches at Arizona State University at the Polytechnic campus. She is the recipient of the 2001 Katherine C. Turner Award in Poetry from the Academy of American Poets.