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  • Three Poems
  • A. E. Stallings (bio)

Peacock Feathers

A plague of feral peafowl in the garden(I know — who knew?) now decimates the grapes,Makes salad of the young geraniums,Kerfuffling dust-baths in denuded planters.They leave ubiquitous piles of poo, as drabAs any other poo. They make that soundAs if of something throttled in the jungle,Or honk to out-goose geese. They’re worse than roostersAt judging dawn — say four a.m. — the moon,When full, rattles them off, one after the other.They’re something else to fight about: you swearCome autumn, you’ll take up a rifle — blam!Are we the sort who murder birds? SometimesThey catch us off-guard with pure pulchritude,The sheer implausibility of it,Sublime unlikelihood. And when they molt,The garden sprouts a ferny iridescenceDazzled with targets. Sometimes I think of Argos,Monster with a myriad sleepless eyesSet to spy on Jove or ward his mistress,Fabled insomnia of the suspicious spouse.Her pet slain, Juno gathers the glamour of glares,Still watchful, in a fan of green-blue feathers —Unlucky things to bring into the house. [End Page 70]

Dutch Flower Painting from the 1670s

The ladybird (or -bug) exits stage right,Or, no, stage left, tiptoeing the tabletop,But somewhat towards us, towards the source of light,While overhead towers the scalloped cup

Of brindled tulip, pillowy peony,Bouquet of blooms that never blew together,Golden-age adynaton. The beeThat crawls away, behind the base, however,

As if to hide some sadness in its face,Or disappointment in the painted bowers’Stigma and stamen, vanishes apaceBehind what isn’t there, that vase of flowers.

It doesn’t fly. Is it an allegory?It drumbles off to where oil’s darkness hives,Natura morta cum memento mori,As by withdrawing, mystery survives. [End Page 71]

Lice

It starts with a hunch:watching her scratch unthinking-ly behind her ear.

You loosen a hitchalong a hair’s burnished shaft —it’s just as you fear:

now you’re picking nitswith a fine-toothed comb no less,lousy metaphor.

How pediculous!But now it’s personal, it’schemical, it’s war,

no quarter, no truce.You lord it over their dead,their pedantic puce,

undo the unborn(murder is meticulous)that star her dark head,

divide in sectors,lest anything be over-looked, doubt’s niggling itch. [End Page 72]

Mankind will neverbe rid of them; like the poorthey’re always with us:

vectors of nothingbut disgrace and shame, charmlessas they are harmless. [End Page 73]

A. E. Stallings

A. E. Stallings’s most recent collection is Olives (2012). She is a 2011 MacArthur Fellow and lives in Athens, Greece.

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