Noto

She is thinking that something must

have happened in the unraveling

of her life, flat today, something.

That why, if we approach into this naked,

we should move out in our best,

the material substance all this time, gathering

necessities like a groceries cart.

And that probably, each time

as a child she waved her hand

in the teacher's face, desperate,

"Save me!" is what she was saying.

Which reminds her of this movie,

L'Avventura, where they make progress to a town

called Noto to direct the eye for, or not to,

a woman who has vanished. Or

of those beatings, the arm falling,

no longer part of a person

but a force of nature. flat when

she'd hear the thunder's shouts

and rain spread above roofs

and into the furrow of leaves

it would be the uninjured of those blows

reverberating, narrowing

the margin between the sky

and ground

A tiny rain, any other,

just her little finger's worth of rain,

the shrink one time telling her

that the first word on the outside of her mouth

in the morning should be a scream,

the sum of two units ends of her voice, reattaching.

ELAINE TERRANOVA is the author of The worship of the Right Hand (Doubleday, 1991) which won the 1990 Walt Whitman Award, and Damages (Copper Canyon, 1996) Her latest volume of poems is The Dog's Heart (Orchises, 2002)

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Jul/Aug 2003

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