Lion City

Carol Frost Click to read more...

frostphotoCarol Frost was born in 1948 in Lowell, Massachusetts, and as a child spent a year in her mother’s hometown of Vienna, so German was the first language she spoke. She studied at the Sorbonne and earned degrees from SUNY Oneonta and Syracuse University. The author of eleven previous books of poetry, most recently Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences and Honeycomb, she is the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Professor of English at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. New poems appear in Gettysburg Review and Plume.

Shi Cheng

Light does not wake the lion,
so deeply still is she, drowned in the valley.
I tried to imagine the eels and carp
nudging her stone flanks, the five gates
to the darkened heart. And then I thought
of the souls who had left
and how the city had borne
the preserved wooden beams and staircases –
her most obstinate desire to keep
what had been in one piece. Forgot the noise
of the flood, forgot valley animals running,
as if from beaters in hot bush and rushes.
Soon there was no more wind, rain, or sun.
Lion city lay so still she ceased
to exist. When divers sweep their lamps
through ideograms of bubbles
toward the entrances, the lion-dogs
will still bare their teeth and growl.
Small wonder art outlasts rule.
Lion-mouthed lights drift in the streets.
Milky parts of our night sky
swing out over earth’s ruins.
Unnerved by the growing absence
of scents mixed with urine on grass
and bushes, I start an elegy.
Lions fatten on the plains,
we can see all souls that departed
at all given moments. There is plenty.
And then there is no more plenty.

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