As though the mercury's under its tongue, it won't 
talk. As though with the mercury in its sphincter, 
immobile, by a leaf-coated pond 
a statue stands white like a blight of winter. 
After such snow, there is nothing indeed: the ins 
and outs of centuries, pestered heather. 
That's what coming full circle means - 
when your countenance starts to resemble weather, 
when Pygmalion's vanished. And you are free 
to cloud your folds, to bare the navel. 
Future at last! That is, bleached debris 
of a glacier amid the five-lettered "never." 
Hence the routine of a goddess, nee 
alabaster, that lets roving pupils gorge on 
the heart of color and the temperature of the knee. 
That's what it looks like inside a virgin.