Extra Credit: Week 12 Improv

Medallion

By the gate with star and moon
Worked into the peeled orange wood
The bronze snake lay in the sun
Inert as a shoelace; dead
But pliable still, his jaw
Unhinged and his grin crooked,
Tongue a rose-colored arrow.
Over my hand I hung him.
His little vermilion eye
Ignited with a glassed flame
As I turned him in the light;
When I split a rock one time
The garnet bits burned like that.
Bust dulled his back to ocher
The way sun ruins a trout.
Yet his belly kept its fire
Going under the chainmail,
The old jewels smoldering there
In each opaque belly-scale:
Sunset looked at through milk glass.
And I saw white maggots coil
Thin as pins in the dark bruise
Where innards bulged as if
He were digesting a mouse.
Knifelike, he was chaste enough,
Pure death's-metal. The yard-man's
Flung brick perfected his laugh.

                         Sylvia Plath

Contravene

On a perfect square of travertine

flat and brindle, obscure as a map

of the monotonous Sahara,

lays a limp lizard.

Black-faced and striped like the sun

folding into the sky, her legs

darted under the weight of her

snake silhouette. Eyes uncovered,

she watches her own disintegration

like when I watch the fire

crawl down my Virginia Slim,

she ashed like that.

Yet her face kept its shape

despite the heat, the lack

of moisture.

That smooth pearl without shade

or shell had become prey

to her prey, red periling

over her line, her mouth,

the sun’s beam still perfecting

its aim.  

             Brandy Adams

There were some suggestions to take a section of "Epithalamium" and model it after "Medallion." So I tried to do that but I did not want it to have the exact same feel. This draft needs to be expanded, which I hope to find the time to do before handing in my final portfolio. Suggestions?