Darla Beasley

THE BOMBYX MORI AS THE BRIDE OF BLAKE

THE BOMBYX MORI AS THE BRIDE OF BLAKE

This is her secret human dress,
the way her breasts droop
like intellectuals,
who have just been matched in a game of chess

(she is ornamented with appropriate designs
her universe is 25 cubits in height)

every six thousand years, she misses a stitch,
lacing the paper with silk to the spine
and the stratospheres camber, the planets brim,
but always she steadies the heart on her sleeve

which is why her ribcage is serene and hollow,
the feeling of skin
stretched taut over drum,
beating in time, with houses of tin
crooked skylines, vocal peaks,
the roofs and gates of slate and steel

(how small the keys are
the smallest of servants)

unlocking further the human abstraction,
or what might transpire in a conversation
between her groom,
her shadow,
and thirteen angels

there is a rebus, in what her strands have to say
how they floss in her lap as swollen rivers
a language that glows,
just an hour out of reach

a moony, little night.

 

 

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"The Bombyx Mori as the Bride of Blake" is tied to a larger piece entitled "Catherine Sophia's Elbow," which traces the odd devotion between the unorthodox William Blake and his wife, Catherine, the illiterate daughter of a marketplace gardener. Consider the poem as a study of creatures domesticated from the wild into even stranger environs. Although adept at the art of silk-spinning, the Bombyx mori moth is blind, and is therefore related to love. Or history. Or maybe I was inspired by film footage of Jim Morrison, one of Blake's contemporary others, who composed a passionate poem onstage about a hybrid moth, just before he was arrested for indecency in Florida.

EDITOR'S NOTE:

The illustration, Silk Glands of the Larva of Bombyx Mori is originally in the Silk Reeling & Testing Manual, available at http://www.fao.org