Bag Lady In the Portrait Gallery

BAG-LADY IN THE PORTRAIT GALLERY In all my failed moments of ambitious grace, The truth, swarth-headed, lifts its greenest shape To madly light the curls of whitest lace Edging your throat, and redeem the nape Where a brown knob burnishes the bone. Such well-bred tenants of the proudest hock Like ancient grandees, dawn on my lone Outride of the politic, and who can mock The wasteland where now our dreams Have only the patina of reality to make us sad, Where derelicts abound in housing schemes For the heart’s homeless moments, and the bad Lands of myth are skeletal. Public thresholds Invest our private myths, and the flesh holds. FROM IN MEMORY OF HER 2004, 2008