—after Odilon Redon’s lithograph “Your Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity”

Monster of perfectibility and infinite progress,
spirit ascends from the dark swamp’s dead matter
rises through mist, intent on the divine.

Your mother’s heart recoils into a strange vacuum,
coiled in a dusty crawl space behind the chipped porch lattice,
in the attic strewn with leftover debris of memory.

Lifted, until the fringed green eye pierces the sacred canopy.
The mossy skull is all that remains, hung on gossamer threads.
You will never love the earth again.