Woman Under the Washington Street Church, 1853

She was buried under glass, almost floating the churchyard.
One winter Sherman said, Lie down to sleep, safe in my hands

as if wholly your own, then burnt the town, the church
beside her. The new church bricked her underneath

like war china in bedsheets—the only way in was a hole
in the broom closet floor. The woman’s story was passed

down to me, heard at a party—someone hadn’t wanted to let
her go, buried her under a window. I lived in a cabin behind

a stained-glass store, then in a treehouse, on the beach,
in a dark, low house in the snow. It was already dark when

I found her church and climbed over air-conditioning pipes
the size of small cows, over the wire playground fence,

pushed open the gate to the oldest cemetery, grass lumpy
like bodies under my feet, dirt cantilevered, as if it would give

way, send me cascading into a sinkhole of the long-dead,
their bumpy limbs. In daylight, the janitor would probably

let me in, but I’m afraid of the broom closet shutting,
like the oval plate over my face, a lid, a hand over my mouth,

afraid of the crooked house my bones will make alone.
In the dark,

one of her eyes has slipped open a little, indigo-rich—
night pond swimming inside—

though she’s gone, passed through her skin like a winnowing
house, through the page of her dress, through the sieve

of church walls, through methodist song,
through salt print and press, and the bleakness of ink,

pouring out of his hands black from the fires
she’s passed through.

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