to Steven 

From the little that's left, I recognize a face and a cross.  
A ribboned bonnet and the beginning (or end)   
of a dress.    

By her feet, I can only guess: an eggplant or a squash?   
Are those two pumpkins?   
A pear and an apple? A maybe galvanized wash tub   
laying on nothing, dangling   
over the edge?    

I imagine the rest: a kitchen. The cobblestoned floor.  
The countryside through the kitchen door. A rooster crowing  
through the morning two centuries old.    

Or is it evening and the sun, as it downs, erases her,  
bottom-up, strip after strip?  

Is that why she looks so fixedly, so   
uncompromisingly,   
beyond the erasures of France?    

The next to be erased, after her hands, will be the cross?  

Last, her steadfast face?  

______

from The Loving Question, December 2024