I dug out the porcelain bust of a doll, first;
her cheeks the tickled-pink of rosehips,
her nose, so small yet broken. Frost bit
its comic end. Without arms, her hips,
too, were frozen in the earth’s cervix,
mid birth; unable to push herself free of it,
she’d given up, suspended between the spit
and swallow of orange clay. Her eyes, black dots
beneath twice fired glaze, long since lost. Extinct.
But her mouth, the diagram of a seal, was perfect.