A television lovely is forsaken by a man
and gestures wildly at her heart.
I wish I had inherited such drama.

Beyond the impossible nose on each Madonna,
there is a body curious with grasping.
The Madonna stays still

the stunned, the silent darling.
Shame, shame, this lilt in her arms, she ought
not to tilt her chin, but rear
up toward him

or shiver at least.

*

When everything is proper with imminent purpose
resistance has no part in it.
Saints have no excuses for flinching, for feeling
so forsaken as to
cry out—

*

Lie back and the body will happen.
If you need to make it proper you must speak.

*

In darkness
              the world is what my body touches.

It is only the body and only the body
as the sparrows stir below my belly. . .
Such dull birds.

*

. . . they do not cry out.
They are the usual shrills.

*

But love requires performance:
When the soldiers raised up Jesus
to leave him perched, exposed,
he could have finished with the calm
what they do, I do. Love could have remained
the arranged thing, the pronouncement.
Why the sudden anguish (where I rush to him),
the swelling in music?

It would have been easier to give in
to the shape assigned him, not to have summoned
the cry—

to have given into the quiet. . .
(while seduction was still a form of disappointment).