Judith Harris   THE MODEL Each evening she goes to the sitting. She can barely hear the grackles in the park, the crossing guard's low whistle. It is becoming twilight, the neighborhood stews are warming; the moon, a comma, swirls above dogwood. This is the hour when the little gold keys pirouette at front doors, when wives, the color of milk, press close to the windows. Although it is fall, she wears the same summer dress, revolving in lemons. With a blue thumb, the wind reels in its leaves. She thinks this is what it must be like to be motionless as a stopped clock, or a clinched fly, or the page-boy manikin in the tailor's shop, to be, not a body, but a statue. Now, as night leans to kiss the frail lips of the moon, someone tells her to hold still, and she thinks this is the unreal, the painted sky and black trees stretching above the frosted clouds of her town-- and the lungs of flowers, dark flowers, breathing so softly, so perfectly, no one can see.     JACOB'S DREAM Flocks herd with their young, buffeted by the long sticks of rain. Darkness pauses; it is the silence before all things. At least this place was certain. Baskets of figs, the moon's soft dial. Someone takes stones and sets them for pillows. You bow yourself seven times before sleep. The hills are far away. Women eat raisins and carry their sons. What are you thinking so close to the stars? When the ladder is set up to the earth-- reaching toward heaven-- the sky appears more fluent in its radiant shining, and the bushes extend their bronzed fruit, slow emissaries of light; and a name.   Judy Jashinsky Lost Letters Of Artemisia Gentileschi charcoal on paper see more work by Judy Jashinsky     MATRUSHKA DOLLS How many coats of darkness can there be as a child falls asleep, like a story within a story; or a doll within a larger doll like the wooden dolls my mother wrapped up in two small boxes and carried home from Haifa. Green dresses, bowed kerchiefs, and painted faces, bellies halved and shellacked in bakers' aprons, girths wide as the earth itself, belted with a tiny crack at the middle. My mother never told me how babies were born, only that the body unscrewed itself like a jar and that the shell peeled open; and inside was the seed that would begin the child, like a sprout, growing: a girl within a finished girl as a maze uncoiled upon the map or a bobbin of thread unwinding, or a branch unraveled from the licorice twist of wind or the sky lifting up yet another hollowed mask. Now I have my own daughter, a scroll of flaxen hair laid in the spread palms of afternoon, and I wonder what she dreams as she spirals down into the dark orchard I meant to plant inside her and the darker orchard underneath. And there a gardener gathers under the base of each tree more red and gold in airy baskets, until, one day, my daughter will eat the flaky seed that will split her in two and break the sky with a cranny of thunder. My daughter was born in summer among the lemons and roses. What my mother told me whispered again in my ear: how a child snaps out from a tree, and the cored world circles and circles around the black mouth of its own equator, sealing itself back together again.   FISHERMAN'S FLIES Tinsel wings snipped out of horsehair, head concealed in its helmet, emerald thorax, the compound eye, exquisite in its glass bier, all luminous nymphs, or naiads, hatched not from larvae but a thin filament's drop at the stream. They are beautiful, I say, not knowing the real from the fake, from buglike nymph stage to dun, rainbow to spinners, all names that ring like a bell: brown drake, blue-winged olive: yellow miller, black ghost, coachman, and mayflies, eggs reborn, bursting, dodging like microscopic miniatures of man's first flying machines, pinions flapping on arm, sailing up over the treetops, foredoomed as winter's only lightning bug, flecks of snow hitting the pond's surface, then ebbing one by one. What counterfeit jewels: a little tarnished from the wear and tear, now housed in a tin box, like sampled candies, feigning sleep as frozen statues do, nestled in the sham stillness of the summer heat, just catching the rust of sunlight on the brittle hinges of their spidery legs and paintbrush tails. I think of them all as sudden masterpieces-- and seem to nudge them irresistibly, as if to chock them from the airy airlessness of some human dream, as if they were not so frail, or waterlogged, from all that molting, colliding, and diving, only to rise again each time from the dead.   AFTER LACAN .................................for Mark and Marshall One elm in my neighbor's backyard shudders in the darkness, its branches adamant, still gold. I have seen it harden against the cold, heard its voice endure, like an open wound. And tonight, somewhere between knowing and not knowing, I watch as one by one its rough leaves, light downy tufts in the vein axils beneath, flicker and blow out, because of the stars, because of the inevitable body, because there are always more consoling words to fall into, before us, and after us, but never our own.     Judith Harris is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University, and author of three books of poetry, Poppies, Song of the Moon, and Atonement, which was nominated for the William Carlos Williams and Lenore Marshall prizes. A fourth book of poems, The Bad Secret, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in 2004, and a book of criticism, Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self Through Writing, was recently published by SUNY Press (see www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=60726 for more info). Recent poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner and The Southern Review. She resides in Washington, DC with her husband and daughter. Published in Volume 4, Number 2, Spring 2003.