Still Life with Stump & Skull

Over a hundred years, no doubt, & big
enough to need grinding, left instead to gray
& grow smooth. Someone placed the skull
on the stump’s ringed plate, antlers still
attached in their sockets above the empty
eye holes. Two carcasses going old
together for company. Echo & reminder
of the direction we’re headed & how form
holds to order, skeleton within the tender
leaf or muscle stretched across a frame.
Watching these two page-white bones
fill day by day with fine lines & cracks
feels like reading two different translations
of the same source, the one written
in a language lost long before I came
to this road, this yard, this mulch scattered
over the ribs of roots inside the ground.

 

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Mira Rosenthal is the author of The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize, and Territorial, forthcoming in the Pitt Poetry Series. She is a past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Hedgebrook, and Stanford University’s Stegner Fellowship. Her work appears regularly in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Guernica, Harvard Review, New England Review, A Public Space, and Oxford American. Her translations of Polish poetry include Krystyna Dąbrowska’s Tideline and Tomasz Różycki’s Colonies, which won the Northern California Book Award and was shortlisted for numerous other prizes, including the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Her translation of Różycki’s Litery is forthcoming from Archipelago Books.