If I built a stone wall, if I rebuilt a pre-modern wall
rebuilt for millennia, if my fingertips bled from asperities
exposed by capillary water uptake in ancient limestone,
if I sheltered within the niche I built in the wall, hewn
of tufa, neapolitan, classically pocked and ochred
and proofed against the elements with a bitter amalgam
of fermented cactus, if after all this drudgery the niche
was no larger than a womb in which I had folded myself
like a fetus fully configured, genitalia and cognition formed
and on proffer, as ever, borrowed thoughts, as ever,
on my mind, like the sweetly self-effacing letter Henry James
wrote to William—“when I image those resources of yours
in their large romanticism, I look out of my window
at my so rosy and so mulberried and so swarded garden
with a more consoled sense of its small contractedness”—
I would know only the annealed, the unconsoled surface
of my own contraction, how I abut it on all sides
and within, the same ophidian concretion ossifying
my blood on retinal disk as in clear cornea, as if
I were less pliantly alive, less snake than tesseral snake
on buried mosaic, proffering the first apple to someone,
a woman, a man, an ancestor, unseen because unexcavated.
—David Woo
This poem appears in David Woo’s Divine Fire and first appeared in The Threepenny Review.