Portrait at Faiyum

 

she contemplates a different world
and balances her mind
between hot clamor days
and dark darker darkest tomb

poses for a mummy portrait
needful for her afterlife
artist laid upon a plank
with warm lumined beeswax strokes
catching her alive and pensive

she foresees her body wrappings
redolent with almond oil, palm wine
and pine resin for a sealing

mourns a desiccated body, natron shriveled
bereft of brain and liver…womb
identities … all canopic jarred to ancillary

tastes bitterness at the thought
of priests touching still-ed magic
from the even tempo of her heart

and now her pulse and sweat
and tear washed eyes
and eyes…and eyes

see through from being
and a slipping plane to plane

 

Bonnie Marshall

Artist Unknown
Woman’s Mummy Portrait, 70 AD
Hawara, Faiyum (Fayum) Basin

blade sting

we near death are not yet as
pocket lint…soft gray felting
re-mem-brance

instead…
we are crisp ironed  alpine forest
spice thread saffron…and we
blush carnadine to water with
our hands

your conversation in the other room
is noisome to us as mosquito drone

and if we gaze at you as if we
do not comprehend it is because
we do…hear over under ‘round
above and through you

did you know…inside…we laugh
at…do not go gentle…lost the battle
did you know at brink we do not care

for tissue rustle dry cough tearless
we dismiss your presence…and
we know our blade stings  and…how
soon you’ll heal the cut

 

Bonnie Marshall

Art by Elizabeth Opalenik

 

 

death watch

Bijou…in afternoon is amniotic hatchery
dried parsley and old women’s shoes…
then evening steeps it to bean soup
sour laundry soap and moldy windowsills

Bijou…where rats…twitch…scurry birth
each way over under through…attentive
to faint hiss of cockroach mouthing glue
beneath pale skin wallpaper peel

Bijou…where brown bats sweep through
broken panes…strike insect flick…and smoke
white doves coo guttural on ledges…and night
shrinks wood to incremental creak

Bijou…copper stripped…stage rain warped,
house curtain velvet torn…all potent with decay
though I shall not gravely mourn for knowing
how previous gives way to new

and…I shall not be present for the wrecking
smash and crash, nor shall I recall its marquee
silhouette against an empty sky without seeing
as in dusty mirrors…my own exiting

 

Bonnie Marshall

Photography by Joey B. Lax-Salinas

 

Hamlet and the Piraha

“There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?” William Shakespeare   (Hamlet, 5.2.214)

To live as Brazilian Pirahã
is to be wholly in the present
where mists of past and future
are intangibles of time.

To live with Pirahã worldview
is to have no word for worry.
Dreamtime is the same as waketime…
seamless experience.

To live on the Meici River
is to flow one with the moment
where death is observation
eyes close…breath stops…
and readiness is all.

Bonnie Marshall

Art by Salvador Dali

imperfect arabesque

murmur laughter call-outs purled
and swirled her periphery…where
chromatic images blurred vision
field to fog…dry-grass apples night

the high wire spindled space
beneath the plexus of her feet
for transition of a plane
beyond compress-ed gravity

the lifting of her arms…was all
for palming of the air to balance
accounting  compass of her orient
without pretense net…without prop
of attitude for imperfect arabesque

 

Bonnie Marshall

Art by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec