Female Bust – Beatrice Pizer

Female Bust/Nude, Jean and Phillip Earl, Wax-on-muslin rubbing, 1992, Borel (carver)

He who is not Borel was not born yet
in that geologic instant when two
tectonic plates collided,
and a towering mountain range
rose up in Northern California

He who is not Borel, the Basque,
far from his dis-enfranchised
homeland, once sat close
to a stand of trembling Aspen
on the cusp of a Nevada mountain,
in the time of the California Gold Rush

White shirt clinging wet
to a naked back, sweat gathering
beneath his collar,
in burning heat he sat,
watching clouds of grazing
sheep. Woolly as the clouds
that roamed an empty,
open, August sky; praying
to an ancient Iberian Goddess
to rescue him
from sage-brush isolation.

An aching sheep herder,
in the cooling even-tide,
lay dreaming of his wife
who waits for him in Guernica.
Where one cursed day,
eight decades hence,
amidst the tumult of a civil war
in Spain, a bomb will drop
and kill his baby son.

He dreams. Inside his shepherd’s
tent, he dreams of her
and reaches out to touch
her skin in realms of lullabies.

She tastes of milk. He feels
his manhood harden and moves
inside of her. --And come
the morning light, the man
awakens, to etch
the gentle slope of her breast
into the silvered bark
of a narrow tree

And, with stands of Aspen
sparkling in a summer breeze,
baring witness to overlapping
histories, he who is not Borel
makes prophesies: that one day
far into the future,
an anthropologist will come
from the university
to make rubbings
of his yearnings, and hang them
in a gallery
showing his intimacies
to strangers.

Beatrice Pizer