Jenny Grassl
What Is Lost

Rage, rage against the dying of the eggs!

                                                  Each egg brought you desire,
desire's wine of an uncertain year, of a predictable proof, and a bouquet like cypress; its fragrance conjuring the browned hillsides of the Toscana, the piazza horses of Siena, and Cranach's Eve in the Uffizi.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire, desire,
desire's lipstick on lips gorged with sensation or the promise of it, in it, as it comes to the kiss; desire's lack of lipstick after kissing.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire, desire,
desire's Bohemian repartee, its dearth of torpor, its seventh heaven miscount.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire, desire,
desire's maxed-out credit card wardrobe-the outer face of the proffered eggs, the tribal dance paint, the plume and crest of the bird.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire, desire,
desire's beach blanket sprawl, the sun entering pores as though to widen receptors of feeling, heat, taken into desire's core,

and in the peak and trough of waves, desire's eggs pooled and swirled in water, water, eggs afloat

                                                  or taking root as
                                                  pearls in your oyster bed, harbored
                                                  in your pelvic cove
                                                  where gulls, cormorants, and osprey fly
                                                  and feed, and jewelers steal;
eggs die and disappear with each under-the-boardwalk-sigh.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire, desire,
and desire's bad boys in fast cars who would only marry virgins, those queen keepers of the eggs, chilled eggs; now, at this late hour, even their eggs evaporate, take leave.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire, desire,
desire's lost intellectual baggage, its ripe hung cucumber vine and dreams of pickles.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire, desire,
and desire's money, its honey, its vainglorious self, its abetting mirrors,

its scented comforters taking the print of the body like the Shroud of Turin, the body spent and spending, impressionable, this body impressing itself in the comforter.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire, desire,
desire's last barroom call, and desire's rutted groove love song, or digital signal repeating, the over and over of it, the melt in your mouth, the blur in your eyes, the rapture-in-your-brain chords. the love song torment surviving so long after the loss.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire, desire,
desire's hairstyles teased, straightened, curled against your grain, the allure of more, the beehive, the mane, the bob; a lock of hairstyle for him, the sure shorn tress, memento of the eggs.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire, desire,
desire's drenched cellular bliss, desire's thirsty tulips looking for the rain in Eric Clapton, the dew in The Grateful Dead.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire, desire,
desire's marked down necessities: time, love, time running out on love, love running out on time.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire,
desire's moist southern hemispheres, its liquid joints and political generosity.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire, desire,
desire's irrational love of a phone number, a metatarsal tingle, its Paradise herbology, its camisoles and boots, its clear vision in a mist.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire, desire,
and desire's shoe horn sense, ah, love's first disagreement, masked with more fantasy candy, bonny blue skies, its snaking traps and endless caverns, its bitter greens on a chipped plate, its long, long colds and influenza.

                                                  Each egg brought you desire, desire,
desire let go from the hundreds of thousands of eggs entrusted to you at puberty.

Each egg conspired, inside your blood-rich nest to welcome desire, desire
feeding on the dying of the eggs.

O Easter, O bubbles on a ring,
O cooking and cleaning and feminine making,
O transparent colors and bunched balloons!
O lavender-scented dryer sheets,
O ears and silk of corn,
O tubs of butter and cow creamers,
O feathered masks at the ball,
O monsters maybe under the bed,
O sultan's pillows,
O Picasso nudes,
O thong underwear,
O nature crafts,
O letter 'O',
O openings everywhere,
O lilies and trumpet vines,
O one-eyed hat stares,
O ovum,
O mother,
O stranger,
O eggs that brought children
O girl-child, heiress of the eggs

and now for you the death of eggs is done and you feel the whimsical weave of the nest, hanging inside you, secure by a straw to a stalk suspended in emptiness.

you feel the nest's art, its assemblage,
the poignancy of a bit of blue string,
a warp and weft of language fragments.

Ovarian failure.
You don't like to fail.
Fertility popped like so many
iridescent bubbles; atresia. Cell death.

In your youth, creation was mandated inside you from the microscopic
to the organs, the willing, the oh so willing limbs.

The menopausal landscape dims. Birds migrate, leaves crisp brown. Gypsy
moth nests wait to glorify destruction. Those rotted eggs now rattle their dryness.

Fallen, the millionairess' egg empire.

Hang onto shreds of estrogen!
your sagging face has lost too much of it
watching the unfathomable moves
of your hands
without the usual
instructions.

<< Back to Issue 14, 2010