In the Doria Pamphili garden, <br />most of the granite niches are empty, <br />the male gods have lost their genitals, <br />and the Great Mother, Hera, has no head. <br /> <br />Something has gone awry <br />in the artificial lake. <br />Burrowing deep into the black banks <br />enclosed by wire mesh, <br />families of nutria are eradicating- <br />with webbed hind feet, <br />blunt muzzled heads <br />and long orange incisors- <br />Pope Innocent X's pleasure garden's <br />eco-system. <br /> <br /> Gothic as the unconscious, <br />the heavy tapered bodies <br />root along the irrigation ditches, <br />making their way in a criminal trot <br />towards the swans, whose handsome, <br />ecclesiastical wings open out <br />obliviously. <br /> <br />Each day I come back. <br />The skay is Della Robbia blue. <br />As I rise to my feet, <br />a swan-immaculate <br />and slef-possessed as the ambulance <br />bearing my half-dead Mother- <br />grasps into the depths <br />and tears a weed up, <br />dripping like a chandelier, <br />while paddling behind are the derelict rodents, <br />hankering-with big sleepy eyes, <br />suggesting something like matrimonial bliss, <br />and plush gray fur, <br />undulating like the coat my mother wore- <br />to hunt the grass-shrouded <br />cygnet eggs and gut <br />their bloody embryos.<br /><br />Henri Cole<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/folly-2/
