GIFTS

To see the woman in the hill
Is the first gift,

To see the swell of her hip along the ridge,
To feel her breath among the cliffs
Sighing for so much life,

Then to see her everywhere
Is the second,
In the coral reefs deep beneath the sea

Attended by sea beasts,
Her face hidden by sea weeds like spanish lace,
Her long white hands

Stirring the tides,
White hands everythere,
Moving together, this way and that,

Like schools of fish.
Her bones litter the desert floor
Which was once the floor of the sea,

Where the ship once sailed swiftly
Bearing the three brides to the three grooms.
All these bones

Are their children,
Belong to them.

To see them sail
On the ink-night tides
Is the third gift.

To see the hill,
To see through the hill to all its halls of bones,
To see all the veils and white dresses

Drifting down into the deeper halls
Stiff and heavy,
Entering the fossil room,

Whose fourth wall is the front door
to the Tomb of Resurrection,
To see all the dark hands at work

On the white flesh,
To see the hinge
In the slab-tomb,

And the stairs to which that doorway goes.
To see her face chittering and screadming
In a flock of bats,

Flying at nightfall
Into the deep trees,
To see her face forming in a cloud,

Forming in the orange boil of the sun.
To see your hand grow clear as glass,
To see her face reflected in you palm:

The last gift is not that.
To assume one's clothes
When the mirror is an orchard

In which her face blooms, luch,
Layer upon layer,
To look through the window

At the hill of bones,
In which the tiny white bodies stand and stretch
And prepare to go deeper down,

Where, on the hillside,
In the sun,
The tombstones flush hot like cheeks,

And below them,
The dark seed sends its first tendrils forth.
To know this,

And to assume one's own skin,
One's own face,
To go forth as if singular and new,

That is the first gift,
The woman breathing in the hill,
The hill of bones,

The ship of brides going to their grooms,
The white bodies going deeper down,
The face that blooms in sky and hand,

The body, with each fast step,
Ascending, going deeper down,
A first gift, the last.