(After Kay Steventon's Spiral Tarot)


i.

What draws me to this hollow is the (barren) 
rockbed, empty as a church on a Friday night.  A flame 
burns (here) in my sternum, that spinster’s firebone 

where the chambers of my black pruneheart 
contract like wizened fruit.  So many lamps to be lit:
farmhouses, temples, suburban split-levels.  

The label reads IX, the number of impossible tasks 
undone in darkness.  See how my dress twists 	
around my thigh, binding?  There’s a small green 

snake in my left hand.  I can hold him 
with only three fingers.  I’ve always been barefoot, 
blueveiled, a sun behind glass, swinging somewhere 

in the open.  Stop.  Burn here, in this strange, loose place.


ii.

The label reads The Hermit, but I imagine 
women just outside the frame, picking apart their braids 
among the dry nettles, telling red stories.  Somewhere, 

a daughter is calling out that the cows are dry, the wheat, infected.
You are a ghost, she says, thin as a willow switch. 
But when she reaches for me, pebbles drop from her fingers.  

There’s a spider in her mouth, weaving her tongue shut 
and torso-withered.  She carries a scream in her pocket.  She feels 
sorry for the dead, the way they smell of oil and oleander.


© 2008 by Susan Slaviero. All rights reserved.