There’s a woman somehow veiled in marble

who is only for me so I take her out of the

Art Institute through a back way and no one notices:

she lives with me now, happier than in the gallery

with the cold white lights, in my home she is seen

for who she is, though the veil cannot be removed,

its hardness impenetrable, but now she can be touched.

– from “One More Time at the Minneapolis Institute of Art”

Acutely Life: Poems available from At Bay Press in February 2024

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