Ivory monastery, you invite
retreat, your quills without ink, your needles
hollow; you are slow exhalations
of whistled breath, both cut
and seam, the noteless stems of music a girl
scores into her arms; you are the soul’s
razored canister. Antennae
of many voices, you tune to the milky ships
of distant planets, your fray of ghosts
without waists, without wrists, a crystalline heart
slivered to fossil trails
of shooting stars; you are the desert’s
drained hourglass, its whittled
vanishing, you are the bristling unlit incense of fog
and sea froth, your liver-spotted sleeves
the stiff papery threads
of a petrified fountain, village cookfires’ lingering veil
honed to narrow vials, to spines of moonlight
echoing the body’s
deepest wands, the cuneiform
of longing, how you avoided pain
by becoming its measure, your starved scepters clinging
to anyone passing.

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