Womb Work

Gervase Markham in The Well-Kept Kitchen (excerpts of The English Housewife published by Penguin) on the distillations of waters and their virtues notes

Water of radish drunk twice a day, at each time an ounce, or an ounce and a half, doth multiply and provoke lust, and also it provoketh the terms in women.

Maggie Nelson in "The Canal Diaries" in Something Bright, Then Holes

carnival. Pink prints
on white tissue

announce another month's
passing, inconsolable.

"Inconsolable" seems incongruous. Not so when we restore the context set up by the previous lines. This is about a lament about the passage of time.

I differ. Go to sleep
in anger and heat

and wake again
to the pour
of rain, streets

emptied of their
carnival. Pink prints
on white tissue

announce another month's
passing, inconsolable.

Later in the poem there appears the sanitary napkin named by brand and described by shape: "the hourglass of a Maxi." And further on we find in a litany of persons to envy. We encounter envy for those "happy & fat with child" which is linked in my reading to the envy of "those / whose bodies beget / an absolute forgetfulness." Sets the inconsolable in a different light. Not so much about a recognition of mortality as a keening over what is spent and will not bear fruit. One remembers that Lent follows Mardi Gras and its Carnival. But this is not the land of the Big C Catholics. The consolation is in and of the poem.

And so for day 1500
21.01.2011