The Last Gods She sits naked on a rock a few yards out in the water. He stands on the shore, also naked, picking blueberries. She calls. He turns. She opens her legs showing him her great beauty, and smiles, a bow of lips seeming to tie together the ends of the earth. Splashing her image to pieces, he wades out and stands before her, sunk to the anklebones in leaf-mush and bottom-slime—the intimacy of the geographical. He puts a berry in its shirt of mist into her mouth She swallows it. He puts in another. She swallows it. Over the lake two swallows whim, juke jink, and when one snatches an insect they both whirl up and exult. He is swollen not with ichor but with blood. She takes him and talks him more swollen. He kneels, opens the dark, vertical smile linking heaven with the underearth and murmurs her smoothest flesh more smooth. On top of the rock they join. somewhere a frog moans, a crow screams. The hair of their bodies startles up. They cry in the tongue of the last gods, who refused to go, chose death, and shuddered in joy and shattered in pieces, bequeathing their cries into the human breast. Now in the lake two faces, floating, see up a great maternal pine whose branches open out in all directions explaining everything. -Galway Kinnell
Posted on: Fri, 04 Jul 2014 12:04:14 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015