The Laurel Tree—
Because Daphne Prayed
to the Gods for Help
When Apollo Wouldn't
Take No for an Answer
This is how magic works against us—
how being in hell is not always necessarily a bad thing—
how the odor from the man sitting nearby decomposes oxygen—
how the feral cat bites the hand that feeds it—
how newspaper headlines promise to lie
and skin sickness spreads into leaves of hair—
sorrow bends tears into strings of bark—
a minute slaves into an hour, the lecturer going on and on,
an hour becoming a day, a day a week, the pen out of ink,
the pencil lead broken, a time to sleep, a time to stretch,
a heart stone, the grain in laminate, rings of tile,
the number of seats in one row, the moon, the sun,
the moon, the sun, the moon, the sun, the moon,
clouds, rain, snow, frost, the moon, the sun, the moon,
the sun and the man at the lectern still speaking
clears his throat finally, swallows an imaginary wind,
begins to sing—the sweat of swamp, the swamp of musk,
a triage of lips/tongue/throat: an eczema of wood.
| Copyright © 2013, 2023 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
Michael, I’ve read this haunting poem several times, continually grabbed by its pertinence to my own life’s repetition and mysterious decadence. I sought help from Wikipedia’s entry on Apollo and Daphne, but the story’s history is complex enough to require a graduate course of exploration! From what I do know of the story (and of Cupid’s erotic role in it), I connect it with the underlying, mysterious role of Mother Nature in pushing her creations’ generations on through births and deaths and births and deaths…. Which only compounds my astound at the power of your poetic mastery!
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