after Virginia Woolf’s Orlando  

a pocket knife, a patch of grass on an otherwise  
fallow field, a foreign emissary, a scowl on the face 
of an infant. He called her a thoroughbred, an hourglass,  
a master calligrapher with an instinctive feel for how  
ink should exorcise itself from pen. In short,  

she was a predicament, an innuendo, a steamboat 
caught with its pants down: half curtesy, half fire 
-fly, he liked to watch her writhe light over an uneven  
countryside. He called her a pincushion, a cast-iron  
skillet, a maple-scented candle with a mind of amber  

and patricide. Darling dear, oh my lovely, bright-eyed 
shotgun. Zipper, zipper, you lewd metal tongue. He’d call her 
and call her, but she didn’t seem to listen, enamored 
as she was with the obliteration of time, the splitting 
of the atom, the barren cries of nature from its plush 

pink throne. She had better things to do, hemispheres 
away. She could canoe over the corpus callosum to  
the right side of the brain and be free of his throbbing  
microscope and panoply of objective lenses scorching 
down like a noontime scowl. Here, she sits, in decadent  

disarray, mascara smudged on a queenly cheek, quiet 
coiled in her collarbone. Let Freud interpret her choice 
of cocktail. Let Lacan find her a mirror to mimic 
man with his bulge and bellowing windpipe. She 
can cut a cigar without castrative impulse. He tried  

his hardest to put her into words while they scurried 
to the corners of pages, pursued the subtle grace  
of marginalia as she colonized the curled ends of her  
thoughts with a shawl. As she noticed how lively  
the soil after a forest fire.  A proprietor of ample rot,  

a browbeaten daydream, an obscene seamstress threading  
one moment to the next as if such vicissitudes were bent  
on sense, she might wear these names when she chooses.