Carved Ivory Head of a Woman

by Danielle Legros Georges

taken from my mother’s house many

years ago, whose provenance is the tusk

of a beast—whose fierce intelligence is

expressed in its amber eyes, whose flesh

is grey as a Lake Kivu dawn, whose memory

is long, whose eye is the size of a human’s

—mine, fixed upon the study’s top shelf

atop which sits the object—whose flesh

is the beige of bone, whose eyes are inversions,

whose visage is a sister’s, by which I mean

a Black woman’s, whose lips are beauty,

whose nostrils are a slight flare, whose coiffure

is the precise separation and togetherness

of cornrows, whose forehead is high

—whose origin resides in the sculptor’s

mind’s eye, in the concatenation of the model’s

exquisite genes, whose father is a full moon,

whose mother is the sun—as all life is anointed,

and all life comes down—and the sound of the first

wound is made—as perfection is subtraction—

as a tusk is extracted—as the chisel bears down,

and the artifact formed and beheld,

as the right price conceived, and the sale

made sweetly, and the item packed

and carried across land and air.