Self-Portrait as Kuanyin

I think she would be merciful if
she did not have the face of a girl.

Here she is statue.
Here smoke has accumulated like held breath on her altar
and bled into clay like exhalations, and
I think what I think when somebody
tells me I look just like her. That beautiful one,
they call her because there are so many
Kuanyins but that one is beautiful.
I have a watercolor of a scar above my right
eye, must’ve been a second brow wrongly
etched into flesh,
me over her, palimpsest.
Now she appears to me as myself when I pray
and my forehead does not touch the earth,
space between evidence of an impious girl’s body.
Evidence: I am absent
in the deficit arithmetic of museum files,
lying inert and lifeless
beyond collection, whole or not and

loss = one.
I think she would be beautiful if
she did not have the face of a girl.

How to restore a gilded statue: pry open the pit
of a peach and sweat down until pectin
oozes from the husk. Brush onto mudstone
and ha, ha, blow voiceless vowels until half-dry until
the tongue lolls with elegies, until I exhale and find that
gold foil rejects the plaster, ruined and dry and numinous
as summer dust on a peach.