Penelope worked with some guarantee of a plot.
Whatever she unweaved at night
might advance it all by a day.
Me, I ground the same stones for fifty years
and what I undid was never the thing I had done.
I was unrewarded as darkness at a mirror.
I prepared my surface to survive what came over it –
cartographers, printmakers, all that lining and inking.
I ordained opacities and they haruspicated.
For them it was a new start and a clean slate
every time. For me, it was coming full circle
like the ripple perfected in stillness.
So. To commemorate me. Imagine the faces
stripped off the face of a quarry. Practise
coitus interruptus on a pile of old lithographs.