Anna Maria Helena

The morning curves to you, arched like a bridge of sighs between waking and sleep. The gaze is hard to shift when a small form among the twisted sheets holds a door for me to enter--- offers a picture more delicate, vulnerable, crystalline, than my own. The light, with its own story, counts the white brick of the wall as if we have forever. Anna Maria Helena, like the bells of Easter ringing softly down the mountain from the isolated church, you rise from your sleep and rub the dreams from your eyes, arms stretched like the blue-black span of the cormorant's drying wings before flight. Call no man happy till he's dead, said a Greek, but he had never watched the sunrise pull you from your bed--- a rare fish from the accidental sea that every thousand years or so takes me, fisherman, for a ride.

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