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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
SARAH'S MONSTERS, by KAREN SWENSON Poet's Biography First Line: There is an entire row of monsters lined up Last Line: Across the front lawn's shadows. Subject(s): Sculpture & Sculptors | |||
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...AT THE MUSEE RODIN IN PARIS by LAURE-ANNE BOSSELAAR THE PARALLAX MONOGRAPH FOR RODIN by NORMAN DUBIE THE SAINTS OF NEGATIVITY; FOR ERMA POUNDS by NORMAN DUBIE A ROGERS GROUP by ROBERT FROST ON A HORSE CARVED IN WOOD by DONALD HALL JADE MOTHER GODDESS by JUAN FELIPE HERRERA IN GALLERIES by RANDALL JARRELL |
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