There is no spoken sentence. All she says
will stay. It will be quiet when I go
out of the room and stop being a priestess.
She looks down. Her quiet death is unashamed,
undimming power like receding grain
that waves inside my heart in shocking rag-
ing silence, beating in the window light.
She will not go to make new presences,
but stays to go. Her presence is the loss.

In the cold sky that waits each season out,
her body’s ancient stars make restless calls
against the throne that quivers in my heart
as fiercely in love as in the hate
on which four thousand years of sorrow fed.

Her birdsong joys shine ruins in my heart.
I seem to stand on some undying plain,
watching the monuments that dawn again.
The gravity of goddess is above
my eyes, though never gone from history.
So many must have noticed, with this shock,
such patient looking up, and looking down.

First collected in Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2013).