Second Place Winner, May 2005 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Second Place Winner, May 2005

MISREADING A DEAD WOMAN’S POEM: CLING
      Laurel K. Dodge
      (MiPo)

Eventually I was placed on a bed like a boat.
   --Julia Darling

Her body, the hull of a leaky boat,
her yellow arms, oars about to fall off,
the room, an egg-shaped ache and the sky full
of dirty windows. Guilt stalked, shadowy
and caged as Rilke’s panther—I didn’t do enough,
I said too much, she rued. Time was teething;
time was toothed. Light was muted but still bright
through the transparent skin, veins apparent
as the twigs from the tree, scratching at the window.
Why won’t somebody let it in? The fall had stopped
at last, alas, and drops glittered like Egyptian beetles.
In the kitchen they were balking and mewling:
What to say to the dying woman. She tried to tell them:
It’s hard to let go but she couldn't be heard above the tea kettle’s
shrill whistle. The scent of crushed chives and the coos
of mourning doves warned her through the Demerol.
She was not immune to omens. Her slippers felt abandoned,
forlorn so far below. How long had it been since she’d stood
on two legs? How long had it been since she’d felt the earth
solid and whirling beneath her soles? Yesterday?
When the door swung open like a jaw, she knew it was time
to go even though she didn’t want to. It was like taking her lover
in her mouth, taking him down, down her throat.
Afterwards, still clinging to her stone hand,
he swore her last words were: The air is whinnying.
Last thought as she rode off on the broken-backed
stallion: The body, bastard that it is, can’t be trusted.

Judge Aaron Welborn’s comments: “As its title suggests, this poem invokes another (Julia Darling’s ‘End’) and inverts it--almost line by line, image by image-- into a dark meditation on the collapse of the body (a timely meditation, given Darling’s recent passing). Where Darling goes gently into that good night, here the speaker rages acerbically against the degradations of a slow death. Yet the strength of this poem is that it need not be read side-by-side with its other in order to work. It’s sturdy enough to stand alone, and it does.”