A Rose and Its Seiche

When Daphne decided to allow her breasts
to receive mouthings, the severed Gods became alert, for her
essence could weep to the turnings
of a tongue.

Undefiled and clever, she wrapped herself
in incantations: a ruse and its worm, a rose and its seiche.

Now a deer, now a thrush nosed the vulva of a knot, and she
rose before him, and the moss of her unbound the blossom
of his lips.

Her chest became a harp and he became the other half.


Silver threads fastened their sternums, and she held his wrist
to her hip, and he rose into the god green ring.



A boar urinated down her untwining legs, tearing at new hair
indiscriminately.

Daphne tore at her hair.


There was coarseness and weeping aloud.
She concluded that speed and departure are preferable
to bark.


Once she stopped. Her breasts stopped. The wings of her hair
fell. Her mother (who had offered her plumper body
at the time of the boar) perched,

the size and color of a heart.


Beyond the tips of Daphne’s pinkness, a freckled back
strathspeyed, sprang, cartwheeled, reeled
and dashed, flipped,


flipped, flipped and leapt.

The thought--This could be my daughter. She should have been
my daughter--frayed her lips.


A Rose and Its Seiche [#40]
© 2000 Fammerée


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Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


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Photograph by Susan Aurinko

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“A Rose and Its Seiche” appears in Lessons of Water & Thirst,
a book of poems by Richard Fammerée.

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