Pieta

[Enter, in mourning habits, VIRGILIA, VOLUMNIA leading young MARCIUS, VALERIA, and attendants.] Coriolanus, 5.3

I. Valeria

If this sonnet describes my normal preoccupations,
I’ll have to suppress it. There’s a tempest
in the backyard. I’m at my usual station
on the cedar porch, loving this process: peremptory

five-stress lines penned with my feet in a puddle—
urge partly groky-clear, partly olfactory.
It’s kind of a muddle, so it ends with a riddle,
obscenity becoming phylactery.

Bouncing rain battering my legs shrunk back,
toes curled, feet turned in on their edges,
chest wet, crotch wet. The poem is about the facts,
but saying it never declares it aways fudges.

This sonnet may see the light, as it’s discreet,
never once mentioning Christ’s beautiful, precious feet.

II. Volumnia

For what save my own organism do I feel love?
Maybe I’m wandering this department store alone,
no earth in view, no stars above.
But where can I go now? There’s a bone

I have to pick with someone because I need a rhyme.
It all comes back to how you feel, you see,
because, no matter what you do, you’re trapped in time.
You’ve missed the elevator—for the sake of prosody

and prosody alone, you rant and shout
of ultimate things of the heart, of distant wars,
things that were all settled and played out
before this department store ever opened its doors.

This tacked-on couplet will seem pat, I fear.
Read your phylactery! The end is near.

III. Virgilia

Seems right that sonnets should come in threes,
like the three Mary’s: Mary Magdalen,
Mary Shulamit, and Mary THE MARY—
Shakespeare needed them to be three, that’s all. It’s only human

to want things in triplicate, like your three
eyes, your three knees, your three tongues,
your three hearts, not to speak of Calvary’s
three crosses. No one is yet so young

as to remember the final battle in which hope died.
Hope’s friends gave to the end the final drop
of their devotion, when the will was tried. Shall friends abide
the extinction of my flesh when I am without hope?

One image there is that shields me from all harm:

the corpse of the slain God in Mary’s arms.