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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