| Orpheus Under the Table i. High Tea On being served ephemera:
Spot more?
No thank you yes please.
(sotto voce: Quickly--)
ii. More Singing Underneath The table is covered with paisleys embroidered
with tongues of flame that look like sperm. What of it? Once I sat at a table where
somebody served me
a plate of sex. A nice one.
I tasted
good. Mellifluous, apis,mine own honeybee,
will you ever taste me?
I have the sexual parts of plants. You fatten your cells for a baby bee now
at the edge of the other sea.
Dance a bee dance in mind how good I smell.
Still, my outcast state
flower’s a forwarding address. Don’t you think I wear it well,
this red dress, past-tense, old girl
thing dilemma, this
The Paisley Question Mark
(a mystery by Agathon Christie).
At least I recollect to ask:
O Meno, what is virtue?
Are virtues then a swarm of bees? Does the eye of the hive have a bee’s eye view?
Which is to say anything but blue--
and many. Call virtue
beezantine pleasure
petal leisure
fetal embrasure.
Hoard of honey.
Skeins of smoke knit a thought
for a fontanel to cross.
Con a text, shreve a loss.
A-swirm in sperm.
Sutra, a thread of cloth
a cloth of gold
fiery tongues
silver spoons
and tea grown cold. That’s the context but it’s all wrong.
It’s talk through my tablecloth hat
from my unattached head:
so far below the salt
I’m under the table.
Even the song
plays dead.
iii. Time Trials The body is the best mystery.
It wasn’t, then it begins;
it is, then it ends. One moment, he is my dog then a car
and a perfectly dog-shaped nothing on the road. When yellow leaves or none or few do hang--
that is now.
This was, too. --Liz Waldner |
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