I am here engaged in destroying
We ourselves a geologic force,
more constant than ice,
more dreadful than fire.
Our fingers in every pie-
chart of cause and effect.
Have conjured chemicals
that don't break down,
that have eased into every
gut and glacier.
I too have been a menace,
advanced on poison ivy
with my ray of Roundup.
I am become death.
And plastic.
But who laughs last?
A virus had me
confined and peering
out the window
at other window
peerers.
It was so quiet seismologists
could hear the earth
discuss the future:
murmur; crack.
It used to be nothing was certain
but death and taxes.
Then we invented
intravenous feeding tubes
and the Cayman Islands.
Daily here we roll the dice
we've carved from stolen ivory:
snake-eyes, snake-eyes.
Sarcophagus, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Contain the dead,
the living.
I having-been-born
bear her boxed,
rotten, a dried sum.
Remember fades to
a finger joint, a wide-
eyed surprise inside.
Loving someone chipped
and sheared, tapped, smoothed,
I touch her face,
my amazon.
The last laugh,
this flesh eating
stone so cold.
Marilyn McCabe's poetry has won contests through AROHO, Word Works, Grayson Books, and NYS Council on the Arts. Collections of poems include Perpetual Motion and Glass Factory, and chapbooks Rugged Means of Grace and Being Many Seeds. Videopoems have appeared in festivals and galleries.
She blogs about writing at Owrite: marilynonaroll.wordpress.com.
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