A SKULL AMONG THE FLOWERS

Dear Miss Barros,

We have read your poem and regret that we cannot use it.  
Thank you for your interest in our magazine.

                                   Sincerely yours,
                                
                                  The STM Editors
                                   by: Gloria G. Goloy

P.S.

indeed you are much too serious

for one so young.  Why write of

skulls and excreta and such things

when your world is so beautiful

           at your age.  Still, thanks for
           sending this to us.

A SKULL AMONG THE FLOWERS

A skull among the flowers...,

who had a desk at city hall all to myself

and now a plot of grass grown earth---

I lived in quiet outskirts of the flesh

walked homewards each God’s evening down

not-so-narrow streets, ever homewards.

I did not know---I shunned---the alley-tunnels

of the       , throbbing estero veins where

dead embryos simplified in silence.  I passed them

quickly by, riding homewards,

and shut off all with a white handkerchief.

Railed on to the route-years I watched

each day go through its paces faithfully,

dull wordless days, and watched

each evening’s moon fulfill the calendar’s predictions.

my nights were brief excursions to family resorts

respectable X’s on a well-known map;

Whatever exotic’s I was aware of, and desired,

waited on some supreme promotion.

Hurrying homewards I dreaded most the city’s

intersections, dark-glassed my eyes against all

but the traffic lights.  I saw

not beggar’s hands but dirty nails,

not warmth and softness but enslaving legs.

Grown middle-aged I laughed to see skin cling to skin

in some dark corner of the crowded park

and went home cursing them and pitying.

I did not know my impotence.

Dreaming alone, lulled by the hum of

air-conned suburbia, I’d wake up

mouth gagging with remembered ashes and excreta;

but I thought of death as little as I thought of life

and never understood...I, now

a skull among November’s sudden flowers.