After Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
Museum sculptures glow like lamps at dusk.
My guttering spark
departs this world’s archaic brilliance.
I am that cheap amphora
turned by machine to gore its sides.
A clichéd female curve
below a gaping mouth.
What florists dust on whatnot shelves
for wan refrigerated buds
and spores of baby’s breath.
My vessel carries brittle stalks
in its restricted borders,
brown spires like frozen seaweed
without the ocean’s thunder,
the burnt sienna of November.
Deader than dead,
one branch points inward
its accusing finger. Dickens’ third ghost
seeing my future: a deserted grave.
Here, there is nothing that sees me.
You must change your life—but how?
Angele Ellis’s latest book is Under the Kaufmann’s Clock (Six Gallery Press), a hybrid prose and poetry valentine to her adopted city, with photos by Rebecca Clever. She also is author of Spared (A Main Street Rag Editors’ Choice Chapbook), and Arab on Radar (Six Gallery), whose poems won her a fellowship from the PA Council on the Arts.
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