By Leslie Ullman (from Natural Histories)

After  “L’Acropole,” by Paul Delvaux

First he noticed my
face, he said.

At a distance
the bones surfaced,

they split the light
into pools of no light

and my hair, he said,
so colorless

yet full of breath.
He would walk

into it, he said.
He would disappear.

I undressed for him,
the room so familiar

it contained no odors.
The white walls,

their shadows in place
fell away, and my body

emerged as space
shaped like a body.

Leslie Ullman is the author of four poetry collections and, most recently, a hybrid book of craft essays and poems Library of Small Happiness, 3: A Taos Press, 2017. She is Professor Emerita at U.T.-El Paso and  teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts. Her awards include the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEA fellowships and the 2014 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award for poetry.