Menopause:OffPitchOffPinnacle
Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair,
not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last
strands of man
In me or most weary cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, which day come, not
choose not to be.
Gerard
Manley Hopkins
from
“Carrion Comfort”
The beauty
gone, Thief’s eyes
are always
open, always moist, as though
it stole the rogue
and rutting elephant’s chemical
must secreted
from the temple and down
each wrinkle to
the lip and tongue,
it’s crazy
fragrance turning the want into
something
primal, beyond thought, before
words burrowed
and furrowed
with their
hands and blades and a touch
of the tip of
any finger or lip, mostly
what’s fullest
and fattest, smooching up
the harrow like
some snail who
by morning
(because this is a poem
about a
thief)
has eaten the
best leaves in the garden and then
been pried,
been sucked so completely
so thoroughly
out, so by-the-course-of-nature
that nothing is
surprising at all but the little holes
in the middle
of the plants, little eye
sockets with
the orb gone. Poof!
And all there
is beneath it is this
tiny empty
shell and the ants coming
and going,
coming and going, drunk
on whatever relics
remain.
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