Weighty

Leonard Baskin

Gehenna Press Printwork

17.5×11 in
Woodcut

Weighty
by Ruth Fainlight

There is such a rage in her tilted head and distorted mouth.
She’d thought of my mythological births, from the brow or thigh,
not a wet gag of bristles and feathers stuck in her throat,
vomited out. Anomaly between giant and dwarf.

Like a shift in the structure of matter, that creature, small
enough to hang round her neck among the amulets and
other jewels, became weighty as the densest metal.
They sank down through the temple pavement and limestone strata,
rivers’ sources and roots of islands, to a dark region
where she must serve and worship at his altar, forever.

Of the hundred mouths to the sibyl’s cave, not one had gaped
wider than hers when Apollo’s goad bit into her brain.
She had foreseen it all. But there is nothing that will change
the future. Not even this impotent fury, endless pain…