The Knife Woman

after Louise Bourgeois’s Femme-Couteau (1969-70)

On a bad day she feels the ache
of having been,
as if she’s become a phantom limb.

Then it starts, serrated wave
after wave,
everything dangerous, bladed:

the keen edge of a stair,
a pill bottle’s rim,
her plane about to go down

behind enemy lines
or into a wilderness
in which ready, set,

even the arrows of trees
are taking their aim.
What she needs is a survival knife,

but missing this,
she thinks of the sea star
in extremis, a creature

that can regrow an arm,
and the sculptor
who, nearly done for,

carves a likeness
out of marble
to sheathe herself.