Tuesday Poem: Previously published by The Nerve: a Writing Women Anthology, in 1997

During His Lectures He Notices

that her back is a straight garden 

wall from which the breasts

cascade like clusters of heavy blossoms.

He imagines God's head resting 

there on the startling blue of her dress,

God's hand that sweats

and wrinkles what covers her thighs.

His eyes follow her pencil.

How lightly she holds it, how she resists

putting his gray interpretations across

the white expanse of her notebook.

White. White moons in her nails. 

White sliding down a sheer stockinged leg.

Her shoe like a narrow 

black canoe with a bow:

he will take her across 

the lake of his desire some day soon.

He will begin to plead with her on paper:

Without you, he will write,

I am the soul of a rat, 

a crimson abnegation.

Without you -- nothing 

but a hammer

striking the Pieta, shit

on the head of the Buddha.