Carved Goblet, in the Form of an Apple


He's omitted the snake, this Nuremberg goldsmith
(Hans Krug the Elder?) so we can more easily quaff
the idea of perfection, rounding here from undersized
blooms and leaves.  Even these are ripe for thought,
clinging as they do to the trefoil base or,
capsized like dinghies, steadying on its shaft
a fruit so gargantuan and blithely knifed
its top can be donned or doffed like a schoolboy's cap.
We might take it for the empty mind of God,
or for any burrower's highest dream, but if we must
think snakelessly, hanging "use" where "symbol"
once writhed and gleamed, then we note that our terrible thirst
would end if only the gilded apple were still full,
if only the twig that bears it weren't so forked.

She Who Was the Helmet-Maker's Beautiful Wife
Auguste Rodin, bronze,c.1880-1885


She's still an expert on amour and can't believe
that today one town over a woman's gone missing,

that her husband is rocking clear out of his head with worry:
yes, she was a sterling housekeeper down to the grout,

scum slid off sinks for her, dust rained from the drapes,
and as he sobs all the way to the precinct a crew floods

their rooms with blue lightning and the woman returns—
one up-crooked arm against the boxsprings, a knee smudging a door,

debris arcing into the ceiling, the whole weight of her
fishtailing down the dark porch steps and into the night

which is another story we can't help being drawn into,
as when, centuries later, Rodin recasts Villon's luckless-in-love

Parisian as a nude sinking into the world like a dropped souvenir:
a much-circled map, a spoonrest in the shape of a foot, a keychain

insisting "Welcome to Alburquerque" though she'll never go back there,
though gravity has loosened her skin until it drapes her lap

like a fallen napkin in the pleats of which her navel is still visible,
a small, downturned mouth repeated in the curve of the gallery

in which she slumps forever among those who can massage
a metal skin as if it were mortal, as if in their company

a passerby might brush any woman's splayed-out hand
and not for one wild moment shatter into earth beside her.

TERRI WITEK'S COURTING COUPLES won the 2000 Center for Book Arts Prize and FOOLS AND CROWS is forthcoming from Orchises Press.  Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, The Antioch Review, The ThreePenny Review, the Southern Review, The New England Review and other journals.   Her book about Robert Lowell's revisions for Life Studies, (Click title) Robert Lowell and Life Studies: Revising the Self was published by the University of Missouri Press,1993.

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