Ask about her. As you are
obliged to the secret cell,
look for her. above and below.
Look to Sophia shrouding her fire
within lost towns and cities,
meander of shadow
among the unacknowledged,
life loss and buried heavens
on byways long bygone
inside encryptments
difficult to read.
She has truthful bones.

Heed this cloaked bedevilment
of instancy, each and every
hot fire she guards.
Take off her given names
and naked her
to the burning bone
that is elemental crone.
She trafficks in faces
and her eye is sly,
canny as fox eye or cat’s.
Hers is a cautionary tale
without end or beginning.

She reads, tells stories,
peddles masks without number
for the blank and busy buried.
Are you incredulous,
query her in the month of Quert
about subsistence on mistletoe,
rowanberries and crushed runes.
She may drown you,
flood you with talk, or go dry.
Whatever the transpiration
it will occur mask to mask,
until yours falls off.

She knows full well
all the finely oiled reasons
that blacken concavities,
their droppings
under arched ways and lintels.
Do not let her pass
in all foolishness, elude you
and waste your soul,
this she-owl
in shuffle of padded foot
hooting your song behind her hand.
Wait and be still. Then speak.

Ask to see the amulets
she holds in the figs of her fists,
biometries of lapis and pearls
principled to awe and comfort,
and watch her eyelids in stretch
fine as the skin of rock,
yellow, red, white, brown, black,
curved as her words inspire.
She has breath in her eyes
for filling the empty with life.
Go to her in confidence
as to a merciful ocean.

She may oblige you with words
as sleep obliges with dreams
consigned by morning
to forgetfulness.
She may even hold your hand
for an auroraed moment
fulfilling the eternal life
that lives of her fire,
her touch a difference from
mortal grasping and keeping.
She will surely drink you
from a cupping of her hands.

Holding you in her foldedness
she will guide you through hell,
all the levels of terror therein,
and from an open place
when you think you’re through,
she’ll grin, and wave you on,
send you back where faces hide
decade after decade
wanting to be seen as rising suns,
yet done to death of logics
and the rationalizing practice.
With a small laugh you will go.

As you part she may tell you
not to number bones, count cells,
mark rings in tree flesh, or examine
the mappings of facial lines
to estimate years,
thinking to know life or age.
As the oldest supplication
life goes disguised, she will say,
becoming meditation
as it recedes from appearance,
falling like mountain water
between the immensities.