The more these higher orders look like us, the nearer we are to them. —W.S. Di Piero

From each canvass
she inhales heavy oils
breathed as from a fane
of laundry and books.
Each is different
yet with all she offers
this world’s future
or distant past.
For thirty years
imagination put her
on a bank she smoothed
into marbled jade
the waters stilled
under a milky sky
blanket-wrapped women
filing to the dazzle
beside boulders
that morph into rooms.

Today she looks
and sees the colors
of gamma knife
pilgrims draped
in surgical gowns
herself naked as her palette.
The sacred scene
inside her skull
tilts on a laptop screen
as she lies waiting for
the radiant beam
and in the air
hovering above her eyes
sees a long moment
turning green to red
so she can enter
future or past.

—

Andrés Rodríguez is the author of Night Song (Tia Chucha Press) and Book of the Heart (Lindisfarne Press). In 2007 he won Poets & Writers’ Maureen Egan Award for Poetry. His MA in Creative Writing is from Stanford and his PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.