Nude Descending

N
Like a bowerbird trailing a beakful of weeds
Like prize ribbons for the very best

The lover, producer
Of another’s pleasure

He whom her swollen lips await
Might wing through any day of the decade

A form of health insurance
For which it is never too late

Titanic, silver brush
Hindenburg, of exploding cigars a climax

The watery below, the fiery above
Ashes of print between—pigment between


If the crippled woman were to descend
From her bed, her fortress beyond midnight

Downstairs (nude/staircase) to the kitchen
Naked to sit at the table (writing/thinking)

She might hear the washer spin like a full orchestra
Complete a cycle like a train crash

Before the fiend would stare through the window
Step smoothly into the kitchen, stop some clocks.

Envy shapes a fig tree in one’s breast,
That is, bluntly to say, a cancer,

That is to say
In a mind, a fertile windy field. A murdered child.

Well then, fear, primarily of falling.
Ebony surf toils on the beach, a glaze

At the same moment I am (from a cliff) falling
The kitchen fiend removes his Dior tie

Places his hand over the woman’s
And softly says: I am the lover.


Now if the crippled woman began to dance
To pirouette, to rumba

Growling for her child
Her burning page, the devil would be shamed

(Materialism is not for everyone / Religion is
The extension of politics by other means)

Would disembody like a wicked smoke
Back to the status of myth

Away he’d streak, blue, into the—
O faun, we would finally call, farewell

O faun, we would faintly faintly call
O faun, we would, we would fondly—

She does not dance. She does not wish
To produce another’s pleasure.

They have torn her apart
Into beige rectangles.
46
Rating:

Comment form:

*Max text - 500. Manual moderation.

Similar Poems:

from Aurora Leigh, Second Book by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

'There it is!–
You play beside a death-bed like a child,
Yet measure to yourself a prophet's place
To teach the living. None of all these things,
Can women understand. You generalise,
Oh, nothing!–not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts,
So sympathetic to the personal pang,
Read Poem
0
66
Rating:

The Lost World by Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell
I. Children's Arms

On my way home I pass a cameraman
On a platform on the bumper of a car
Inside which, rolling and plunging, a comedian
Is working; on one white lot I see a star
Stumble to her igloo through the howling gale
Of the wind machines. On Melrose a dinosaur
And pterodactyl, with their immense pale
Read Poem
0
55
Rating:

Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
Even as the sun with purple-colour’d face
Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek’d Adonis tried him to the chase;
Hunting he lov’d, but love he laugh’d to scorn;
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-fac’d suitor ‘gins to woo him.

‘Thrice fairer than myself,’ thus she began,
Read Poem
0
110
Rating:

Madeleine in Church by Charlotte Mew
Charlotte Mew
Here, in the darkness, where this plaster saint
Stands nearer than God stands to our distress,
And one small candle shines, but not so faint
As the far lights of everlastingness,
I’d rather kneel than over there, in open day
Where Christ is hanging, rather pray
To something more like my own clay,
Not too divine;
Read Poem
0
83
Rating:

Yom Kippur 1984 by Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich
I drew solitude over me, on the long shore.
—Robinson Jeffers, “Prelude”

For whoever does not afflict his soul through this day, shall be
cut off from his people.
—Leviticus 23:29
Read Poem
0
68
Rating:

The Death of the Hired Man by Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. ‘Silas is back.’
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her. ‘Be kind,’ she said.
She took the market things from Warren’s arms
And set them on the porch, then drew him down
To sit beside her on the wooden steps.

‘When was I ever anything but kind to him?
But I’ll not have the fellow back,’ he said.
‘I told him so last haying, didn’t I?
If he left then, I said, that ended it.
Read Poem
0
95
Rating:

from Each in a Place Apart by James McMichael
James McMichael
I know I’ll lose her.
One of us will decide. Linda will say she can’t
do this anymore or I’ll say I can’t. Confused
only about how long to stay, we’ll meet and close it up.
She won’t let me hold her. I won’t care that my
eyes still work, that I can lift myself past staring.
Nothing from her will reach me after that.
I’ll drive back to them, their low white T-shaped house
Read Poem
0
79
Rating:

Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
PART I
'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock;
Tu—whit! Tu—whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.
Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She maketh answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour;
Ever and aye, by shine and shower,
Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
Some say, she sees my lady's shroud.

Read Poem
0
70
Rating:

Locksley Hall by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn.

'T is the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call,
Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall;

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,
And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.
Read Poem
0
65
Rating: