The Woman with a Cubed Head
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        There was a young person of Ayr,
        Whose head was remarkably square:
        On the top, in fine weather, she wore a gold feather;
        Which dazzled the people of Ayr.
                               —Edward Lear, More Nonsense, 1877

The woman with a cubed head wears a brilliant gold feather
and two bows where the planes of her head meet.

On the X-ray table, I lie on my side, hands folded.
As the X-rays flash, I fill with questions: what kind

of mating produces a cubed girl? Did her laboring
mother open like an ice machine? And did young Pablo

own a boyhood copy of Lear’s Nonsense, reading limericks
in Spanish translation? Was Edward actually the father

of the Cubist revolution and Picasso a mere thief?
Or should the questions loom larger: the whys

of tomato-sized tumors; the reasons lungs become
spotted as Dalmatians? The woman is tall, and perhaps

for that her two bedazzled suitors refuse her offered hand—
men have always feared the Amazon. Or perhaps the two

are frightened by her skull’s perfect geometry.
Whatever their reason, the suitors still yearn

to dance, and notice she is handsome in apparel:
her dress ornately bordered in triangles, her collar

scalloped like a cloud, her breasts as round as a lax W.
Pablo’s three musicians, their cubed heads less perfect

than Lear’s, continue to play a comic waltz. Garbed
in Learian harlequin and ruff, and presenting the odd

melodic, the trio further proves there is a Cubist
conspiracy. The brown musician, with his death cloak

and square blue eyes, has been in my hospital room,
his hangman’s rope looping over Donna’s neck, his blue

heart pulsing cold. He plays a tune with five short beats,
over and over, discordant with the click and release

of the chemo’s I.V. drip—a quarter and dotted half note
in monotonous twelve hour song. What inspired Lear

to make his woman’s arms and breasts so supple,
but her head so geometric? Remarkable and dazzling,

a beauty with umbrella raised high, why does she offer
hands in peace to those who will refuse them? I have wanted

life at right angles, heads stacked like building blocks,
flat face on flat face. I have wanted to think in crystals,

to have the millennia of a stalactite in the making: the dripping
of liquid over time, the wet minerals coalescing. The idea

already born, L. Frank Baum of Oz knew of Cubism
when his dog, the Woozy, appeared in 1912. Squared body

and ears, cigarette lighter eyes, the Woozy toothlessly
imbibed hives of honeybees. He was fur-less except

for three hairs on his tail, and in Baum’s story, a boy
in shaggy blue needed all three for a spell. The Woozy

was loath to part with them. They are my sole ornament,
he explained to the crowd assembled: the blue boy,

the Patchwork Girl, the vain glass cat with her rolling
pink brains. The hospital women roll around the aisles,

pink-skulled and pearl-headed. Without eyebrow, nose,
or pubic hair, we are fit for any gallery of grotesques:

our brains glowing in CAT scans, our bodies colonized
by the strange, our hands as blue as Picasso’s.