By Emily Corwin
photo: Emily Corwin
You, before all others: entire and undivided.
We left there, our fathers’ houses: trundle bed
and salt-shaker, housecoat-- breakfast grease on
the cuffed sleeve. Left the synthetic tulip, a camellia
of cadmium and titanium white. Hear me this:
these compound leaves, fascicles of hemlock,
double samaras-- five lobed, gymnosperms
and angiosperms. The sugar maples concede
all pigment of chlorophyll. Black walnut taken
up for gunstock and veneer. Paper birch in lands
recently disturbed by fire or mortality. The white
pine’s horizontal branches: a tar sealant for barrels
and ships and turpentine. If we happened to
glance a wolf, a predator of some kind or shape:
get now the broad-axe. I am but afraid;
who then is the culprit? None other than myself.
Today, my winged liner more like sisters than twins.
A candle called “Golden Forest”: cedar, amber, myrrh.
I read about “Dutch orange”, “Ginger” and “Minium”,
see how the shadows come and go: recede, proceed,
mislead me. Abandoned opera gloves and peach-cinnamon
mead. I remember that day, but no glass. Only Dioxazine purple.
The way, in the movie, she passed the knife through him
like a warmed rosette of butter, unthinkably easy.
This poem was inspired by and makes reference to the films: The VVitch (2015), The Village (2004), and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989).
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