Integrated with a Spurious Head, and: Elegy for Estrogen

Abstract

Integrated with a Spurious Head, and: Elegy for Estrogen V. Penelope pelizzon (bio) Integrated with a Spurious Head —Museum caption on the statue of a female deity, recently restored Again this wobbling dread,this discombobulated pang, as though my armature's been bent,or the scale is slightly different between my torsoand my alabaster head. What so upsetting? Really,this trip you're packing for—it jars me less than your insistence parting isn't torture.We touch, divided by no distance miles can measure. You say I should relax:whatever seas sleep rocks you on, my arms fathom you through dreamsremoval from me never wrecks. And once your travels start, each night apart sails you closer home; a journey'ssoonest finished once begun. "When a person who must embarks, tears only worsenthe going." Can being cavalier appease such sadness? I say your logic sucks. It sucks my salty heart (no stone,although until I met you it was marble). Departure's glacial arrivalshatters me. I'd meet its blue expanse with you, and with you stare it down; [End Page 25] to you and you alone I'd bare a face sorrow's freezing rain carveschannels down—but then your breezy stanceabandons me before your body leaves. Alone, I shiver on the brink of maudlin. Still, I'm learning. After all your goings, I find balancing'sa skill that practice hones. It's true my poise is largely ruse, dependent on some borrowed fragment cobbled with cement, but I finesse my gaps so they resemble grace.Even you I'm closest to no longer notice if my kilter skews, or the pucker quivers as I blow this kiss goodbye from your resolute goddess. [End Page 26] Elegy for Estrogen Without which the tits, anxious rabbits, sit up on their haunchesno longer in the sun nibbling grasses, but cower, fine fat alertnessespressed flat, who sense the raptor's presence.And the chin, ample in its sympathy, sinks downlaying the folded pleats of its oldcoat upon the lawn to lap the dew. Must the cunt, too,lament this loss? Atrophies dwindle once-trophied glades, whose rivulets rinsed the helmetsof kings? What balm, after lush spring and summer's flushfall dumb, to say wisdom will comepressing its cool cabbage leaf across my brow? Let all perfumes perish now. This insistence clocks can be stopped with resistanceinsults. The one relief at certain ageis being sage enough at last to admit when I feel bereft.I've little time left for liesmeant to anesthetize grief. [End Page 27] V. Penelope pelizzon V. PENELOPE PELIZZON's Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone Is Time was published in 2014 by Waywiser Press. Her first book, Nostos, was published by Ohio University Press in 2000, and won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. Her awards include a 2019 Hawthornden Fellowship and a 2012 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. Copyright © 2019 University of North Carolina Wilmington