Still Life

I am looking for death.

It is a game we play, Van Dyck and I,
among hard rinds,
the apple peel that slithers
off the white lace cloth, pulsing grapes
the last moment before

they burst. Van Dyck has found
a gilded shell to set
in a long metal stem. One could
sip wine from its blue body.

I want it.

I want life to my lips.
I want to eat at this banquet even
if death hovers. I could serve
in a white lace neckpiece.
I could crack nuts, rest my teeth
against the fragile rim

and not bite down, just feel
the cool scrape
against my tongue. I've never
walked a frozen pond, felt it start
to thaw. (I kissed a boy,
more than one.)

Rumpelstiltskin hunches in the corner,
busy with the straw. I never called out
for that kind of help. I found

a bird's broken body in the basement well,
saw, on a friend, skin soft and paled as butter.
Van Dyck holds a dinner knife
to my neck. I feel its cool blunt edge.

I call it pearls.

Deborah Bacharach

Antigonish December 2009