is what she bends to write across
the bottom of the monotype, each word
as small as someone else’s loss,
as faint as something overheard.
The thirty-seven prints that rest
beside her in a numbered stack
are as alike as hand and press
allow: against a smear of black
a blur of white, a bag, that holds
some mystery left unexplained
by what we’re shown and what we’re told.
We wouldn’t know what the bag contained
except that it’s there before her where
she sits amid her work, a dull
enigma spoken like a prayer
to paper and the press’s pull,
then emptied and refilled. A box
of bric-a-brac is also near
at hand: post cards, a doll that talks,
some ticket stubs, two porcelain deer,
pink shells, brown leaves, a book of poems,
a clutch of bundled letters, a scrap
of calico. From such stuff stems
the life she shelters in her lap
before it’s placed into the sack.
Then, after one more cigarette
is shaken from her crumpled pack,
the plate is cleaned and inked for yet
a thirty-ninth impression whose
distinction resides alone in what
cannot be seen by us who choose
to find the artist in a rut
and, joking, ask, where is the bag?
where is the life? and ask her why
what’s inside matters, what’s the gag,
and what does all this signify?
We look and judge the work misnamed,
unwilling to see the dark’s her home
in which a life’s been kept, reclaimed
from the monotonous and monochrome.