by Lucie Brock-Broido
There is the mourning dish of salt outside
My door, a cup of quarantine, saucerless, a sign
That one inside had been taken down
By grieving, ill tonguc-tied will or simple
Illness, yet trouble came.
I have found electricity in mere ambition,
If nothing clse, yet to make myself sick on it,
A spectacle of marvelling& discontent.
Let me tell you how it came to this.
I was turning over the tincture of things,
I was trying to recollect the great maroon
Portière of everything that had ever happened,
When the light first stopped its transport
& the weather ceased to be interesting,
Then the dark drape closed over the altar
& a minor city's temple burnt to ground.
I was looking to become inscrutable.
I was longing to be seen through.
It was at slaughtering, it
Was at the early stain
Of autumn when the dirt-
Tinted lambs were brought down
From the high unkempt fields of Sligo, bidden,
Unbidden, they came down.
It was then that I was quit
Of speech, a thousand northbound nights of it.
Then was ambition come
Gleaming up like a fractured bone
As it breaks through the bodiced veil of skin.
Imarry into it, a thistle on
The palm, salt-pelt on
The slaughtering, & trouble came.
That the name of bliss is only in
The diminishing-as far as possible-of pain.
That I had quit the quiet velvet cult of it,
Yet trouble came.
Last updated February 19, 2023