Every once in a while, a picture in a magazine
that I happened to be leafing through
will strike me in some odd way and work on me much
as I suppose some songs do.
This one was from some Harper's Bazaar or one of those things.
And it was one of those thin models lying on the sand
and she had a weird colored bathing suit or something on.
Maybe it was painted on, I don't know.
But it was very strange.
And all of this came a two part poem called "Model."
The wood is done with you, and now a bird
thrown all limbs broken heaped in the midst
of a centralist plane.
The asbestos afternoon.
No wolves howl beyond the ridges bones poking through.
Cheekbones bruised by the sun.
Ribbons unwrapped from the legs like chains coming loose,
and the legs and tie themselves, walk around the body.
Your guano hair comes off in patches.
Wanders over the skin looking for a place to grow.
Gaze down at the contours of your flesh.
Exhibition of knuckle bones, half moons,
thumbs press into the bone, collapsed into the middle
of your peasant rags.
One white breasts noses out, a worm looking for a hole.
And part two of that poem.
Because it is a beach and beneath the six
suns regular as soldiers, your legs slide out.
One hand in the pocket of your thigh.
The world beneath an elbow, breasts hard as chewing gum
concealed in paper bags and covered just below the hips
on down.
You view the boys coming in bobbing on the sea.
Your hair takes root, eyes fill with birds.
The beach turns sky blue and they
stumble through the surf with bloody knees, tongues lapping
up the sand as you point.
And they squat before their labor chiseling moons
in your abdomen, the toes dig in, and across your face
the lips two strips of sky.
I guess Salvador Dali would have liked that one.