Letter to 700-Year-Old Invidia in the
Scrovegni Chapel to Be Folded in the Shape of a Snake
Swallowing Its Tail
. . . out of your niche, Galatea'd on hate,
if it weren't for the bloody anemonaed
flames (coelacanthed), that hold you phoenixed
rebirthed, recursed
consuming you spewing you flue-ing
you up. Clutching your moneybag already
cinched
by the tasseled rope at your waist
and reaching to grasp — what? — You can barely see
for the serpent jutting from your mouth whose head circles
back to flick its tongue
over your eyes — your ears so outsized — batlike cartilage
ram's horns wrap around.Embittered, Invidia,
what makes you so perdurable? Attractive in repulsion? The only
figure who rivets? Is it the things we cannot stand to see?
Or what we hear too strongly in the surround?
I can barely keep
writing for want of
what others boast at the next table or blare into their cellphones (so many
soliloquies of public preening that look as if the boulevard has become
an open ward) pounding
by me.You too, I suspect, so self-consumed you've abandoned your stylus.
If you had to read the daily paper, your eyes would glare / bulge in despair
at all the accolades heaped
upon your friends or those who do not stoop to know you — even to
that one
Giotto di
Bondone has painted in stone across
from you: Prudentia who calmly composes herself through the
centuries
at her writing desk
gazing with quill in hand at the mirror which soothes her
feeds her new lines ignores you
ouroboros you into a moiling frenzyso done up in grisaille you practically leap . . .
Sharon Dolin
American Letters & Commentary
Number 17
Special Feature: Wedding the World
Copyright © 2005 by American Letters &
Commentary, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
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