"Afterwords" (IM William Matthews) by Diann Blakely

Your latest postcard's glossy lupines spike                           
In high-pitched hues: "powder puffs," you'd describe them   
If, between acts, we sipped red house wine          
By a glass wall, smoke blurring in stained plumes,
"For dens of vain wildlife."  I'd grin, surprised,                                   
As always, to recall your size-12 tracks
First loped Ohio fields.  Sly, you'd revise:
"For female masochists, or do you think
That's a tautology?"  O arias
Of laughter.  O arias and arteries
And let's howl at the present tense.  At this
Last card, a bad joke best cracked sotto voce
By some gout-ridden, nameless demotee
Whose age-diminuendoed range has chewed
At his career.  Are career and caries
Unfriendly cousins to "decay," black snood
Of the same hue as Death's stained robe?  And care?
And what of carnivore, that scene-chewer
Who prowls through flora glossy as this card's,
Mailed the day you died?  Both of us were suckers
For etymology, still-hungry orphans
Like those two straining for the wolf's stone tits,
Mouths open and now art.  O origins
And terminals, after Terminus,
The god of borders: those between close friends
Who mute a howling loneliness with cards;         
Those, too, between the tame and wild.  Dusk-stained,     
My kitchen's perfumed with small reddish shards
Of Puppy Chow, and now the gluey smell
Of tear-blurred mail.  "The hour of the wolf,"
Said forebears after learning to encircle
Their villages with walls: the dusk-lit gulf
Where housepet and killer become the same--
O arteries  o howl  o terminus--
As flowers and teeth, or flesh and its shade. 

 

                         In memoriam William Matthews

 

-- Diann Blakely

Comments

[Lori]

Richly layered work, Diann!