We fear the undulant — Blackbird Archive

← v12n2, Fall 2013

the uterine wave, the forlorn sway

of ships leaving harbor

of curls. Whose curls? God’s.

Sky-wide, luxuriant as the mane

of a buffalo. Father’s, spread out

like a girl’s bouquet on his deathbed

pillow. Or the indigo whorls

of a deific junkie alone in a shadowy

room, swooning into the arms

of euphoric death, needle

still twanging in the vein

like the fletching at the base

of an arrow. I fear the flickering

of film school movies on the cave

wall. There I am, bad actress

wearing salt-white gloves,

playing a girl who fears undulant

beauty, undulant love.

grief mortality body

Diane Seuss

Diane Seuss is Writer-in-Residence at Kalamazoo College. She is the author of the poetry collection It Blows You Hollow (New Issues, 1998). Her poems have been anthologized in Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework (2005), Are You Experienced? Baby Boom Poets at Midlife (2003), and Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation (1999), all from the University of Iowa Press. Seuss’s work has recently appeared in The North American Review , Indiana Review , Cimarron Review , and The Georgia Review .