Henri Cole, “The Mare”

I remember the shade where I found her
spent and bruised like the fallen apples.
Like them, she was full of darkness,
full of the sweetness which rushes upon us
so soon after death.
She lay there like a mummy,
like the wreckage of an ancient queen,
mild, yet locked away within herself.
It held me the long afternoon—
the secret fruit, the silken mare—
until the day had passed.
I stood and walked among the goats
with their delicate steps
and fed them apples
so mellow
the burst like hearts before the queen and me.

Pierce the Skin showcases selected poems from six collections of poems by Henri Cole written between 1982 and 2007; “The Mare” is from the oldest of those collections, The Marble Queen. Last month, The Nation published three more recent poems that originally appeared in Blackbird and Wolf; the Academy of American Poets has several more (with some overlap). You can also hear Cole read from his work on his own website. Other Cole not in this selection include “Eating the Peach” (Slate) and “Haircut” (The Paris Review).

“I favor a poetry where the soul (both the poet’s spirit and representation of personality) is not occluded by language, not perishable, and not anesthetized by ambition,” Cole wrote in 2000; more recently, he shared a reading list that included works by John Koethe, Marilyn Chin, and Louise Glück (as well as short stories by Joyce Carol Oates).

Cole will be reading this Sunday (March 14) at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

12 March 2010 | poetry |