"Two Sisters Reunited After 18 Years in Checkout Counter"or Delphi


Greetings from the beginning of the nuns: not
as line one of a joke. True temple princesses are swans

clad in flax of varying weights, disparate degrees
of pale and afloat. After dusk they scent each

other's hair with lavender, burn myrrh, feast
on veal. Tidy up again. Between mysteries

their jokes seep like red on feathers: bawdy
riffs off the lewd news dumped there daily

and the hapless petitioners who haul it in. As if!
Oh they're ruthless. The youngest novice, bastard

daughter of some Caesar, is a dead-on mimic, plus
she scoops the eunuchs on the village honchos. Losers!

The earnest girls who came to dodge poverty and
hook noses lurk in her wake, scared of what she'll say

behind their backs. So she names them to their faces.
Dogs. Frigid. The rest have signed on for the sex: It's free.

Or freeing? Virgo doesn't mean virgin, it means possessed
by no man. Despite old Apollo strutting cocksure, etching

every stone in sight.
Know thyself.

As if!