Small Female Skull With some surprise, I balance my small female skull in my hands. What is it like? An ocarina? Blow in its eye. It cannot cry, holds my breath only as long as I exhale, mildly alarmed now, into the hole where the nose was, press my ear to its grin. A vanishing sigh. For some time, I sit on the lavatory seat with my head in my hands, appalled. It feels much lighter than I'd thought; the weight of a deck of cards, a slim volume of verse, but with somethig else, as though it could levitate. Disturbing. So why do I kiss it on the brow, my warm lips to its papery bone, and take it to the mirror to ask for a gottle of geer? I rinse it under the tap, watch dust run away, like sand from a swimming-cap, then dry it --firstborn-- gently with a towel. I see the scar where I fell for sheer love down treacherous stairs, and read that shattering day like braille. Love, I murmur to my skull, then, louder, other grand words, shouting the hollow nouns in a white-tiled room. Downstairs they will think I have lost my mind. No. I only weep into these two holes here, or I'm grinning back at the joke, this is a friend of mine. See, I hold her face in trembling, passionate hands. Carol Ann Duffy