Hello world! Though written in 1997, how I love this one (Happen to find it while editing “Swedish Book”).
. Collapsing In On Itself
A week-dead pike on local stone wall, Placed there or dropped by some passing seagull And ignored; once fresh and full now meagre and dull, Is almost the same as the day that it came, But entrails have started to go. (Are they ‘entrails’? I don’t really know.) Of course it has innards; the roe, liver gall, And I’d guess there’s a stomach. It think it’s a pike - maybe perch, not a haddock! The thing that’s essential, its cardinal what-ness Is something that shows now whenever I to pass it. Everything rotten or heading that way, Falls in on itself in its terminal rot-ness.
Collapsing In On Itself 8.16.1997/revised and amended 5.13.2019 Swedish Book; Circling Round Nature; Birth, Death & In Between; Nature Of & In Itself; Arlene Nover Corwin