Legris, Sylvia

Canada, (b. 1960)

Cold Zodiac and Butchered Pig

  1. Onward the fairweather spleen.
  2. Onward the season of vent and caprice.
  3.  
  4. Giovedì Grasso flies the meat,
  5. trees still larded with winter grease?—?
  6. ice, the Dead Time, the Flensing Time.
  7.  
  8. Flirt fattened Thursday of December’s gorge.
  9. The twelve pigs of the zodiac stew the zeal,
  10. slow simmering giddy fizzling squeals.
  11.  
  12. Uncloister the close-air surgical theater.
  13. Ungristle the knife-jester’s grip.
  14.  
  15. Let the butcher carnival begin!

© Sylvia Legris. Poetry.  (February 2016).

The Lungs and Other Viscera, c.1508

  1. (After Leonardo da Vinci)
  2.  
  3. The botanical cadaver. The bulbous presciently Baroque
  4. liver. The rhizomatous intestinal infrastructure.
  5.  
  6. Lungs an elaborate epithelial embroidery. Adipose woven
  7. begonias, conspicuously stipulated. Scarious. Squamous
  8. crosshatch. Pseudostrati —
  9.  
  10. graphic marginalia. The crowded abdominal cavity an
  11. anatomical scriptorium… l’opere mirabile della natura.
  12. The calligraphic race
  13.  
  14. against putrefaction. Black chalk, pen and ink-wash,
  15. connective tissue… the marvellous works of nature…

Editor’s Note:

Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of lungs and abdominal organs (c.1508) is likely based on the dissection of a pig. Refer to Martin Clayton and Ron Philo, Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum,
2010.

© Sylvia Legris. Cerise Press. Summer 2012, Vol. 4, Issue #10.

About the Poet:

Sylvia Legris, Canada,(b. 1960) is a poet and educator. She is currently a mentor at the University of Saskatchewan’s MFA in Creative Writing Program and is a former Poet-in-Residence for Arc Poetry Magazine and a former editor of Grain Magazine.

Legris has also twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Conjunctions, and Granta, and her third collection of poetry, Nerve Squall, won the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Legris now lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and is also a resident in the state of fidgety fretfulness. [DES-08/19]