Hello world! Though written in 1997, how I love this one (Happen to find it while editing “Swedish Book”).
. Collapsing In On Itself
A week-dead pike on local stone wall,
Placed there or dropped by some passing seagull
And ignored; once fresh and full now meagre and dull,
Is almost the same as the day that it came,
But entrails have started to go.
(Are they ‘entrails’? I don’t really know.)
Of course it has innards; the roe, liver gall,
And I’d guess there’s a stomach.
It think it’s a pike – maybe perch, not a haddock!
The thing that’s essential, its cardinal what-ness
Is something that shows now whenever I to pass it.
Everything rotten or heading that way,
Falls in on itself in its terminal rot-ness.
Collapsing In On Itself 8.16.1997/revised and amended 5.13.2019 Swedish Book; Circling Round Nature; Birth, Death & In Between; Nature Of & In Itself; Arlene Nover Corwin
Arlene Corwin Poetry 