I'm going to give my two favorite Rhina poems, too.
There's one for the beginning of life and one for the closing.
THEIR ONLY CHILD
I am the one who didn't get away.
Their blood tumbled with promise, teeming
quicksilver too luminous to stay;
I am their whole catch, landed and streaming
rainbows. Those others they dreamed of - the charmer,
the saint, the tall magnificent son -
circled the wormed hook, but sensing harm
slid on forever. I am the one
who trailed their bait through the film of the ideal
and rose to the flawed light. No more, no less
than actual, like death, I am the real
one, the waking, the caress.
SONG
From hair to horse to house to rose,
her tongue unfastened like her gait,
her gaze, her guise, her ghost, she goes.
She cannot name the thing she knows,
word and its image will no mate.
From hair to horse to house to rose
there is a circle will not close.
She babbles to her dinner plate.
All gaze and gaunt as ghost she goes -
smiling at these, frowning at those,
smoothing the air to make it straight -
from hair to horse to house to rose.
She settles in a thoughtful pose
as if she understood her fate,
her face, her gaze, her ghost. She goes
downstream relentlessly, she flows
where dark forgiving waters wait.
From hair to horse to house to rose,
her gaze, her guise, her ghost, she goes.
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