** (untitled)
by Maureen Alsop
The night I left is not
the beginning
of desire’s autopsy.
All the men in town
were gone when I
returned. Orchards,
rancid in pollen’s decay,
chastened a slow surrender,
and Elleanor, saying
the unsaid, in what
she wouldn’t want to say …
says it is said now. We loved
who we loved.
Wind and dust
flattened the harvest
and brought famine.
The legend arose
with her arrival,
an ice covered carriage
cradled her casket. Snow’s
civilization cleared
the northeast
canal. In the village
cemetery, where customary
wreaths arranged
headstones, we monitored
the wind. Repetition
of cloud evoked
dialect. The sound
confirmed a question.
From where
did her shame depart.
Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of Later, Knives & Trees; Mirror Inside Coffin; Mantic; Apparition Wren. She is the winner of several poetry prizes including the Tony Quagliano International Poetry Award through the Hawaii Council for the Humanities, Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. She teaches online with the Poetry Barn.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “** (untitled)”? This poem evolved while undertaking what I believed to be a fictional piece of writing. I am still interested in writing a longer, more “nontraditional” form of fiction (perhaps a hybrid? novella? … I’m not entirely sure.). I accept path I am on in writing fiction is very murky, nothing less would do for me, even if the fiction becomes a poem (as it shows itself here). The themes and characters I am not ready to reveal as they continue to formulate. That said, some characters may be alive while others are deceased… war, illness, historic settings in a range of locations are filtering through the writing at the moment.
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