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Today's poem is by Kathleen Peirce

Vault 55.
       

To meet the unmet lover
prepare two blindfolds, cut and sewn by hand.
Brown, his; hers red,
with shapes embroidered where the lashes brush;
add highly-colored pom-poms, circles circling the hem
to decorate the brink of having everything, and to tap
the forehead and the cheek. To dangle there. Death
is with us everywhere, and was, and was the theme also
of Durer's "Wing of a Blue Roller" though one sees green
making up most of its underside, which is exposed,
green going delicately yellow, framed in black
or blackish-blue, but the route of severing is red. Sweet Christ
is everything removed? Everything is broken.
Reddish feathers growing at the joint, the pronged hand
remind, supply.



Copyright © 2017 Kathleen Peirce All rights reserved
from Vault: A Poem
New Michigan Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

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