for years you’ve winked, fanned tawny earrings below a diadem of curls. Found art, you rose from living tissue at odds with itself—crossways from a tree’s upthrust. Scarred by
a buck scraping his antlers, a woodpecker tracking a grub or a termite gnawing a snapped limb. Filched from sawmill scraps by anonymous sculptor hands, your carved hair strands billow ‘round a Cycladic face. Beside you Lorca pushes, flaunts, flashes—hides—duende in the black, striated hollow, behind your wavy facade.

Asymmetrical grain,
puffs a friendly profile,
yet masks a void. Wizards
may claim beauty disguises
caverns—black holes/holy
wombs—where psyche
gestates dreams, that oscillate
into the fictions we make
of each moment. Dear burl,
does that make you, wounded
royalty? Sickness gouged
from a tree shapeshifted
into a woodland Ariel?