August 12: Oliver de la Paz, "Nocturne with the Mummified Remains..."

Well, I just read that Lauren Bacall passed away.  These past two days have really sucked.  All day long, the news about Robin Williams has been playing on the television.  Every time I looked up at the screen, there was Robin Williams' face.

And now Lauren Bacall.

The poem I have from Oliver de la Paz tonight is a nocturne.  A nocturne, according to Dictionary.com, is "an artistic work appropriate to the night."  I think it's also an appropriate tone poem to read for the loss of Ms. Bacall.

I had the privilege of choosing this poem for publication in the university's literary magazine, Passages North.  It's dark, brooding, and beautiful.  I remember being breathless the first time I read it.

Saint Marty is tired of being sad.

Nocturne with the Mummified Remains of a Girl Pulled from a Bog

by Oliver de la Paz

It is a difficult thing, the skin and the skin’s new form
and how what’s missing grows large, as if the source

of something that once drew warmth had poured out,
the sack of the body, filled with sawdust and sewn up.

The knot of fingers folded into a bramble fence. Soft tissue
stiffened to the texture of a ballet slipper, and the elegant

foot, somehow gone from its housing. Here is where
the slippage of selves floats its weight into the deep swales

of summer: the nights are warm and the sphagnum hushes
every sound. Its density troubles the landscape with thatches,

pockets, small underpinnings. Indeterminacies. The bowl
at the center of the bog, deep enough to cover a man

from head to toe in sludge. And the frogs call their soft songs
to find each other in the fog. The frogs stir from deep within

the mist and confuse themselves with their sound. A singular
hum. A singular engine with the sole industry of determining

love. Love, love, they say. Their white throats fire their outbursts.
It is easy to lose yourself among the singers and the dark.

And this is how to begin—softly, the foot presses against
the wet dark peat. Softly the curses of breath rise up

from the breast bone, and to the mouth, the acidic grit of bog’s
dark jade. Into the nose, the terrible intercessions of muck

rushing past the septum into the throat and down, further down.
And from the mind, the bright lariats of holly around a table.

The faces of family, heavenward, lit by the last auroras of something,
a memory pressed against a monstrous glass. It is here

where the body resides and the skin empties its contents. The skin,
hardened into a pouch. The pouch, which was once a girl, holds

nothing but the tragedy of love. The tragedy of beautiful
breaths taken and swallowed and sung.

Just put your lips together and blow...