Saturday, April 4, 2015

Menopause:OffPitchOffPinnacle




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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