Black Lacquer Pool (for Maureen Fleming)

The black lacquer mirror gives rise to and reflects all.

It’s like a naked woman lying still on a smooth, round, black lacquer surface that is covered with an inch and a half of water.

Slowly so slowly she rises to her feet, her every position precarious – yet so steady is her movement that it produces no ripple. Every glide, every shape-shifting shape, every impossible distillation of geometries, is reflected in the serene surface, untouched, true.

She has in each hand a bare branching branch and she lifts these up above her head and she is a source of lightning bolts extending from her arms to the sky (or does the energy come from above to fill her?).

Then she coils inward, lowered arms entwining, and the branches curve and join against her heaving chest to form a baby caressed by her most tender embrace.

After a time, she melts downward, the branches covering her as she returns to the black pool, a body of dead twigs vanished in darkness.