There is an entire row of monsters lined up like ripening tomatoes on Sarah's windowsill. Most of us have one who, beneath the disguise of the grotesque, wears our features - a little man with rat's teeth or a one-eyed fetal dwarf gagged with pale membrane. They sit beside us in offices or at parties quietly as disciplined children. Sarah casts them from an alloy of realities: anatomy borrowed from her mirror, deformities from the malocclusions of the soul. In clay, wax, metals, they look out at long shadows on the lawn where she's hung a dead robin upside down from the chinaberry bush. Its legs are yellow and straight as a schoolgirl's stockings. She clips the legs off with kitchen shears, fits them to her monster's stumps. It spreads cloisonne wings - enameled fans - beneath sky, scratched raw by jetstreams in the setting sun. From the steps of her Nebraska house, Sarah glides its wings, boned like her arm that raises our fear to flight, across the front lawn's shadows. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE SERE AND YELLOW LEAF by KAREN SWENSON THE QUANGLE WANGLE'S HAT by EDWARD LEAR A GLEAM OF SUNSHINE by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW IN A COPY OF OMAR KHAYYAM by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL BURNHAM-BEECHES by HENRY LUTTRELL EPITAPH by KENNETH SLADE ALLING AN ANCIENT PATH by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN HINC LACHRIMAE; OR THE AUTHOR TO AURORA: 32 by WILLIAM BOSWORTH |