Great tusks curl
triumphant
beneath the ice.
Lying on her side
where fate took her
and the cold holds her now.
Cruelly frozen in the act
of being an anachronism,
an evolutionary joke.
All her drives and instincts,
every foolish desire
fixed in the permafrost.
The pitiless antisepsis of time
allows neither rot nor erosion,
just eternal humiliation.
Once I was beautiful,
says the old woman,
showing me her wedding photo.
Look at that figure!
Her yellowed nail traces
the place her waist once was.
The dress she wore to her first communion
hangs time-ivoried in the closet,
proof of involuntary innocence.
In the hills above Nerja
the oval photographic memorial plates show
faithful reproductions of the reproductive.
We’re all lined up
trapped by time
in ice: forty feet thick.
‘Time ivoried’ is such a beautiful phrase.
Thank you. I was worried it was a little over-clever, considering the mastodon tusk.
Beautiful and pointed and provoking, Rgrl. The place where it really grabs me by the throat, and the phrase I think the whole poem turns around it: “Once I was beautiful”. What happens to us? Why do we come to a point in life where our value is in our past? What about now?
Bombarded by your words once again. You use them as a lovers caress or a killers bombs but as always they are yours.