Bones, a knife handle (tarnished

scrolls), old buttons, baby

doll hands and feet stuck

out of a gold valentine candy

box top. “Gold adds validity

to what is essentially

garbage,” says the artist,

who also loves gilded

Siennese shrines. She’s spray-

painted dry abutilon pods from her garden—Chinese lanterns, they’re called—

stuffed their skeletal vegetal lace into an ear trumpet’s smudged horn

of plenty. I imagine her lifting and stretching to gather the plump

pods in mid-summer—scarlet, vermilion—then sorting through hue, to find

the right mixtures of color to capture their true paint. All one summer

and winter they pose for her, like

papery Cezanne apples

in a blue glass bowl then,

dissolving in air, the bright

skins slough to dull dust.

Come spring she collects

what’s left of them up for this

piece called “Repositorio;” she

spray-paints them liberally  (gold

again) so they stiffen like filigree

cages for tiny white doves

(as if a Holy Ghost in miniature

might actually descend, enter.)

No Christ, no bloody hands,

bloody feet, but dismemberment

of the god into the everyday

throwaway, the castoff

humdrum recycled particles

of parts. No Osiris or strewn

Orphic flesh. No blood-spattered

lyre or crown of thorns but

a heart of hammered tin, sprouting

wings like rooster combs

where thorns would be.

A heart that cries: Cock-a-doodle-doo!