Friday, January 24, 2025

Diane Seuss’s “Pentralium” from Modern Poetry

PENETRALIUM 

I wish I could tell you how deep 
the suck goes,
how dark it is and holy, 
it's tragedies siloed. They dot 
the landscape, with oxen, mud hooved, 

and crows. 
Shakespearean but boiled-down, 
a thick gravy, oversalted, 
served on white bread, day-old, 
sold cheap at the bakery outlet. 

It broods on the windland edge,
morbidly forested and bottle green, 
fermented in swamp, dung, skunk, 
and bridled by sorcery, potions, 
bible school puppetry, ogres, faries, 

poorly tendered papier-mache 
good and bad Samaritans. 
Kept awake by good, honest terrors, 
eviction dreams, half-conscious 
fantasies of terrible mothers wielding 

hatchets, but oddly 
free, like a free lunch is free, 
or a vacant lot, or a stinkweed 
bouquet. Just sit with it as you'd sit 
with a legless drunk
 
who wont shut up about the bygone. 
Don't bring your sobriety narratives 
to this bedside, Diane.
Be drunk...it's the only way, raved 
Baudelaire, corkscrewed
through and through with syphilis. 
How artless, this source 
of art, this shit show where 
the greenest 
watercress grows.

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