two animals

The poetry workshop I’m in this semester has been somewhat of an ecphrastic nightmare. In the beginning of the semester I tried to completely sabotage myself by refusing to capture any vividness of the paintings we were offered, resolving instead to write with the general inspiration of an asshole. Though it wasn’t my singular opinion, in an workshop with twenty people, which is about ten too many, every time I heard a line “capturing the vividness” of the painter’s/poet’s soul, or any time the words “golden locks” or “azure” were used, I just had a general urge to slap the crap out of someone. Ironically, things turned around for me when we were assigned Henry Wallis’ “The Death of Chatterton.” about a young poet, first of the Romantics, who poisoned himself when he could not find success in his writing. Symbiosis. Two animals.

The Failed Body

after Henry Wallis’ “The Death of Chatterton”

Thomas Chatterton is dead—
but the poisoned body is a poem too.

Pomegranate hair, a death-curled
mop against the thin pillow,

half starved neck, a thirsty white tulip.

As a young boy, in Bristol, he refused to speak
to other children. By 17 he needed only the songs
of a late summer London to elegize his death.

In the room, some lines have not yet been composed.

An empty chamber coat, the failed body
of a manuscript, a half-stuffed pillow,
a potted lily learning the sun from behind a latticed window.

Nothing can save him. No composition will do.
No one can paint him out of this failure.

And anyway, he is still a young man,
his lips are still full with the bitter poison
of that eternally, unspeakable poem.