Heavens and Earth

Chapter 53: “LES CRUCHES CASSÉES”

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About This Book

The collection assembles varied lyric and narrative poems that range from reworkings of classical myths to sharp urban vignettes and satirical sketches of modern life. Several longer pieces retell mythic episodes with vivid, imagistic language, while other poems observe city streets, public figures, and personal loss with concise reportage and elegiac restraint. Recurring concerns include desire, mortality, war, and social disorder, framed by a tension between heroic past and everyday present and rendered through formal experimentation and dramatic monologue.

“LES CRUCHES CASSÉES”

Even old sofas can be reupholstered,
Covered with chintz that blinks with dragon’s eyes;
Worm-eaten chairs that tell too many lies
May yet be painted, puttied, somehow bolstered;
A rickety piano has a tuner
To plink it back to musical surprise;
And frugal housewives, strictly pennywise,
Cement burst jugs and make them healthy sooner.

But where’s the tinker-devil who will clout
Our cracked-up selves till they hold love once more?
Oh you can smooth your curlylocks, no doubt!
Look what a mess we’ve made on Life’s clean floor!
You can’t patch leaky clay. There are no cures.
And it was your fault, yours! “No, yours!” Yours! “Yours!”