The Poetry Corner

At The Red Throat

By Paul Cameron Brown

In youth, Death was a puny boy possessing but wormy hands & fleshless fingers as in Witch Hazel or Scrooge's Future Ghost - that insipid Evil One Hansel so easily outwitted in a gingerbread house. Time brought increased notoriety. Saucy times with a soupon of respect for the artful dodger. Givens change, an armful of orange lilies, limp & loathsome, on a tombstone door before trumpets of rain. Graven images. Lifeless stone. Death became stone. Stone empty. The maggot emptiness burrowing into chiselled easel and the stone-cutter's savage magic. Just a bitty stone to herald a passing. Night-jars. Old straw-chairs with a broom pronouncing the wall base with its touch empty, the empress of bandages leaning to rags On table scraps, sorry gloom of an old building by a pickled lake leaking into ebb twilight. The coronation of the nightmare, the moon with her billowing robes and withered spoon unfolding midstream ... la cauchemar ou dnude soire to discover, with wonder, ices with sherbet reek like nightsweats; a windsail of pooled light thru puddles of trees. Brackish backwater - thoughts of black ice and huddled masses of silver breaking thru the sun's winter curtain as erupting coins.