Last Gods

LAST GODS BY GALWAY KINNEL She sits naked on a rock a few yards out in the water. He stands on the shore, also naked, picking blueberries. She calls. He turns. She opens her legs showing him her great beauty, and smiles, a bow of lips seeming to tie together the ends of the earth. Splashing her image to pieces, he wades out and stands before her; sunk to the anklebones in leaf-mush and bottom-slime---the intimacy of the visible world. He puts a berry in its shirt of mist into her mouth. She swallows it. He puts in another. She swallows it. Over the lake two swallows whim, juke, jink, and when one snatches an insect they both whirl up and exult. He is swollen not with ichor but with blood. She takes him and sucks him more swollen. He kneels, opens the dark, vertical smile linking heaven with the underneath and licks her smoothest flesh more smooth. On top of the rock they join. Somewhere a frog moans, a crow screams. The hair of their bodies startles up. They cry in the tongue of the last gods, who refused to go, chose death, and shuddered in joy and shattered in pieces, bequeathing their cries into the human mouth. Now in the lake two faces float, looking up at a great maternal pine whose branches open out in all directions explaining everything.

University of Virginia, private collections