The Countess
I’ve begun with four corpses thrown from a wall
into the path of wolves,
and then again with the bodies of girls.
A stream running through a field. Moonlight on
a ruined garden.
Or started later with drifts, with a sense of events moved through air: one afternoon,
a summer especially warm, the mountains, say, east
of what was known once
as Czechoslovakia, grit and sunlight, a kitchen stunned by heat & cherries,
the skin and the dark flesh of the fruit simmering
in an old pan, the flame beneath breaking forms
down into preserves, and outside, the smell of the day’s laundry, sheets
blown over the earth not yet scorched, just
turning through years, through distance: wind-driven, the wave of diesel fumes, a truck
idling along an empty road, then music rising
from an empty room.
Or I’ve started at the edge of a market --a
pigeon
fixed to the asphalt by a stick two boys
drive through its iridescent neck. Statistically
murderers are men and so once, were boys, still
I could begin again with a girl, with Elizabeth
Bathory, who grows
beautiful, one Countess who goes gynocidally
berserk,
but first, at eleven years of age in the seventeenth century, hides in the castle
and from behind a column, watches, as the morning light
clears the field, a man being sewn