The Utter Failure
What's left of her hair
Spears out in green and orange spikes;
Her eyes, a snowman's anthracite,
Look upon us with a stare
So hard we're forced to think that she dislikes
The lot of us, eager to fight
With nail and tooth
Our flabby images of untruth.
Her furious tattoos,
Those Jolly Rogers and daggered hearts,
Bleeding roses and poison darts,
Her fingernails in various hues
Of pretended harlotry,
Are manifestos meant to address
And put to exquisite duress
Her misguided family.
She's punctured her head with painful
holes
In fervid hopes to shock our souls,
And yet she looks merely as grubby
As some punk baroness and her hubby
At Epsom Downs or Ascot.
Cousin Lena's proud ambition
Was to shame us of our condition,
But there she sits, our cute mascot.
Cousin Marjorie
Oh when she's there she's so immensely there
No color but her own, no voice but hers,
No other nature can advance itself;
She is the noontime that absorbs the day-moon.
Large in every sense, rich, overblown,
Rose that droops from surfeit of itself;
Bright flowing dresses brave as carnival bunting:
All Marjorie's grand Everything is here.
The dimpled hands, the sensual smile, the stare
That takes you in as warmly as a perfume,
All sympathy and calm attentiveness:
So much herself it seems she has no self
But only Presence that if taken away
Would cause such lessening of the sense of place
You'd think the room was now no more itself
But only a diminished facsimile:
A room wherein a chamber symphony
Played Schubert for an hour and then removed,
The chairs left emptier than before they came.
So much herself she is wild Selflessness,
Has no more concept of a Marjorie
Than has a waterfall, a sunbaked stone,
The dew-strung spider web, the snuffling spaniel,
The rain-wet sweet gum spread-armed in City Park.
FRED CHAPPELL
has written numerous books of poetry and fiction, including First and Last Words, Midquest,
More Shapes than One, Brighten the Corner Where You Are, and I Am
One of You Forever. The Fred Chappell Reader was published in 1987 by St.
Martin's Press. Among his many awards are the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Bollingen Prize in
Poetry, and the Prix de Meilleur des Livres Etrangers of the Academie Francaise.
"The Utter Failure," is from Family
Gathering (Louisiana State University Press).
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