THE DEAD NEVER FIGHT AGAINST ANYTHING / Pattiann Rogers It's always been that way. They've allowed themselves to be placed, knees to chin, in the corners of caves or in holes in the earth, then covered with stones; they've let their fingers be curled around old spears or diadems or favorite dolls, the stems of cut flowers. Whether their skulls were cracked open and their brains eaten by kin or whether their brains were pulled by tongs through their nostrils and thrown into the dog's dish as waste are matters that have never concerned them. They have never offered resistance to being tied to rocks below the sea, left for days and nights until their flesh washed away or likewise to being placed high in jungle trees or high on scaffolds alone in the desert until buzzards, vultures and harpy eagles stripped their bones bare. They have never minded jackals nosing at their haunches, coyotes gnawing at their breasts. The dead have always been so purely tolerant. They've let their bones be rubbed with ointments, ornamented with ochre, used as kitchen ladles and spoons. They've been imperturbably indifferent to the removal of all their entrails, the resulting cavities filled with palm wine, aromatic spices; they have lain complacently U · The Missouri Review as their abdomens were infused by syringe with cedar oil. They've allowed all seven natural openings of their bodies to be closed with gold dust. They've been shrunken and their mouths sewn shut; they've been wrapped in gummed linen, corded, bound upright facing east, hung above coals and smoked, their ears stuffed with onions, sent to sea on flaming pyres. Not one has ever given a single sign of dissent. Oblivious to abuse. Even today, you can hit them and pinch them and kick them. You can shake them, scream into their ears, you can cry, you can kiss them and whisper and moan, smooth their combed and parted hair, touch the lips that yesterday spoke, beseech, entreat with your finest entreaty. Still, they stare without deviation, straight into distance and direction, old stumps, old shameless logs, rigid knurls, snow-faced, pitiless, pitiless betrayal. Pattiann Rogers THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 13 TAKING LEAVE / Pattiann Rogers Of the unhindered motion in the million swirled and twisted grooves of the juniper driftwood lying in the sand; taking leave of each sapphire and amber thread and each iridescent bead of the swallowtail's wing and of the quick and clever needle of the seamstress in the dark cocoon that accomplished the stitching. Goodbye to the long pale hairs of the swaying grassflowers, so like, in grace and color and bearing, the nodding antennae of the green valley grasshopper clinging to its blade; and to the staircase shell of the butter-colored wendletrap and to the branches of the sourwood making their own staircase with each step upward they take and to the spiraling of the cobweb weaver twirling as it descends on its silk out of the shadows of the pitch pine. Taking leave of the sea of spring, that grey-green swell slowly rising, spreading, its heavy wisteria-scented surf filled with darting, gliding, whistling fish, a current of cries, an undertow of moans and buzzes, so pervasive and penetrating and alluring that the lungs adapt to the density. Determined not to slight the knotted rockweed or the beach plum or the white, blue-tipped petals of the five spot; determined not to overlook the pursed orange mouth of each maple leaf U · The Missouri Review just appearing or the entire chorus of those open leaves in full summer forte My whole life, a parting from the brazen coyote thistle and the reticent, tooth-ridged toad crab and the proud, preposterous sage grouse. And you musn't believe that the cessation which occurs here now is more than illusory; the ritual of this leave-taking continues beyond these lines, in a whisper beside the window, below my breath by the river, without noise through the clearing at midnight, even in the dark, even in sleep, continues, out-of-notice, private, incessant. Pattiann Rogers The Missouri Review · 25 ...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Mar 1, 1997
J R Webster + 1
Open Access