When Bert announced she was leaving,
the taxidermist fell into melancholy.
He knew he had been given a gift
of the finest sadness, and expressed himself
the only way he knew—he sought Bert’s shape
in each new skin he stretched. He began
altering himself so that he would not be
the man she left—shaving his legs,
inspecting his face for stray hairs.
Cruciform, genderless, disarmed.
How defenses get down and then,
yes, even the taxidermist, creator
of the captured life, is played for a fool:
when Bert walked out the door, she swept
a fur over her shoulder, diabolical
as a cat hunter. Cats with their soft bodies,
little mice with their tiny schooldesks.
A whole family of baby rabbits. It was said
that when he posed the snakes
as civil servants, he had gone too far,
but the taxidermist’s devotion took on shapes
he could never have predicted. Sometimes
he behaved as though it were all a gift
from God, as though the turtle offered up
her small wrinkled body, sick of her shell,
ready to be made
immortal.
© 2007 Mary Austin Speaker
curates the Reading Between A and B poetry series in New York City, which pairs emerging and established writers for brief and luminous readings. Her poems have won prizes from the Academy of American Poets, Seattle Review, Diner and Lumina. She has received fellowships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and Indiana University, where she was Poetry Editor of Indiana Review.
Speaker's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The International Feminist Journal of Politics, Ninth Letter, and Bat City Review. She works as a book designer and illustrator and lives in Brooklyn.
