Barbara Howes

Robed in dungeon black, in mourning For themselves they pass, repace The dark linoleum corridors Of humid wards, sure in the grace Of self-denial. Blown by duty, Jet sails borne by a high wind, Only the face and hands creep through The shapeless clothing, to remind One that a woman lives within The wrappings of this strange cocoon. Her hands reach from these veils of death To harvest a child from the raw womb. The metal scales of paradox Tip here then there. What can the nun Think of the butchery of birth, Mastery of the flesh, this one Vigorous mystery? Rude life From the volcano rolls and pours, Tragic, regenerate, wild. Sad, The unborn wait behind closed doors.

Up, up, slender As an eel’s Child, weaving Through water, our lonely Pipefish seeks out his dinner, Scanty at best; he blinks Cut-diamond eyes—snap—he Grabs morsels so small Only a lens pinpoints them, But he ranges all over That plastic preserve—dorsal Fin tremulous—snap—and Another çedilla Of brine shrimp’s gone ... We talk on of poetry, of love, Of grammar; he looks At a living comma— Snap—sizzling about In his two-gallon Caribbean And grazes on umlauts for breakfast. His pug nosed, yellow Mate, aproned in gloom, Fed rarely, slumped, Went deadwhite, as we argued on; That rudder fin, round as a Pizza cutter, at the End of his two inch Fluent stick self, lets his eyes Pilot his mouth—snap... Does his kind remember? Can our kind forget?

Lady, take care; for in the diamond eyes Of old old men is figured your undoing; Love is turned in behind the wrinkled lids To nurse their fear and scorn at their near going. Flesh hangs like the curtains in a house Long unused, damp as cellars without wine; They are the future of us all, when we Will be dried-leaf-thin, the sour whine Of a siren’s diminuendo. They have no past But egg husks shattered to a rubbish heap By memory’s looting. Do not follow them To their camp pitched in a cranny, do not keep To the road for them, a weary weary yard Will bring you in; that beckoning host ahead, Inn-keeper Death, has but to lift his hat To topple the oldster in the dust. Read, Poor old man, the sensual moral; sleep Narrow in your bed, wear no More so bright a rose in your lapel; The spell of the world is loosed, it is time to go.

We came so trustingly, for love, but these Lowlands, flatlands, near beneath the sea Point with their cautionary bones of sand To exorcize, submerge us; we stay free Only as mermaids glittering in the waves: Mermaids of the imagination, young A spring ago, who know our loveliness Banished, like fireflies at winter’s breath, Because none saw; these vines about our necks We placed in welcome once, but now as wreath Against the scalpel cold; still cold creeps in To grow like ivy over our chilling bodies Into our blood. Now in our diamond dress We wive only the sequins of the sea. The lowlands have rejected us. They lie Athwart the whispering waters like a scar On a mirage of glass; the dooming land, Where nothing can take root but frost, has won. And what of warmth and what of joy? They are Sequestered elsewhere, southward, where the sun Speaks. For all our mermaid vigilance And balance, all goes under; underneath The land’s gray wave we falter and fall back To hibernate within the caves of death.