Say the Unseen
       

Say, the unseen needs a body in the world.
And that you are a woman to sit and watch would you
ask the icon be reduced to tears, to certainty?
I had been through the gift shop
crowded with nuns and pictures
of nuns but in the chapel where we sat
together in those drifted rows
and the icon alone was looked on—
                          Sybil of Discontent, why can't I
let disaster find its own way, why hurry it?
—this waiting and wanting the weeping to start
and doubting it—
proof to dissemble the face.
Waiting as I do for a certain word.
I have been through the gift shop, the walls
are crowded like the walls
of those rooms transfigured by the faces
of the dead and missing.
It is left to the experts to make the matches.
The country that practices torture has moved on.

Copyright © 2010 Michele Glazer All rights reserved
from On Tact, & the Made Up World
University of Iowa Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission