She Was at Home in Water that Moved, that Rare

by this time, the mines and farms
having slowed everything down
with runoff and silt. When she found
the current river, she stripped off her clothes
and got in. As my uncles would say,
it looks like you’ve been getting four square meals
a day, which I took as shame,
wanting to be thin, but they meant with pride
as they’d been raised when no one had enough to eat.
She, like me, was rabbit flesh
and put up her hair to keep it from getting wet.
Her nails were red, the kind I had until a girl in math
asked what was I, a vampire or a witch? She could care less
about diamond horseshoes or a man named rose
with long-stemmed beauties below a hotel
on the square named times.

It was a new year: the water was warm
to her foot and the bedrock on the bank
to her skin as she slipped in.
She wore an opal ring that she hadn’t yet lost,
and the church with steeple pure as lightning held a song
behind her, paramount on the hill.
It wasn’t like she was in broad daylight after all:
it was a grove. But the men followed her down
and the women, too, an insult to womanhood
they just knew. In her birthday suit,
our mothers said when they saw the painting, to sound cute,
naked or nude rude words from the city
far to the east that never slept.
In the art museum, the director tied a rope to try to hide
what everyone knew,
what everyone had come to see.