For some, it’s simply faces, eyes yet to open,
necks taut, escaping what even they have yet to name.
Further on, some have writhed their torsos free,
agonized, living every moment with what is missing.
They feel the heaviness of stone.
They believe in its impenetrable dark,
neither dragging them into nothing nor letting them be.
This is my walk to David.
I see him from this hall of Michelangelo’s unfinished business.
He is enormous, done, standing with victory. Already, from here I see
he knows the cost his slingshot wrought, death sent along its way.
He knows some things must go if others stay. He knows the way it is.
Will I live to see the form I take in dreams awake,
the one I make and make again
in a thousand tiny choices:
What dress to wear tonight?
What dance to make me remember my real name?
What man to trust with my very life?
I stand as tourists split around me, a torrent
rushing toward the perfect thing they came to see.
One more before I join you, David —
victor of the odds of size and shaky circumstance.
A woman of middle years, so clear to me.
One hand remains in stone,
just one pull, a small thing now — a detail, really.
She is already made; she has made me.
She has learned it is not the stone that holds us.
It is that we do not know we are the blade.
