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The King loses. Lance-splinters pierce his
eye and throat
in a mock duel. He was meant to win and face
the Queen with garlands at the end.
Now she heads the train of mourners, lines
stretched kingdom-long. Michel de Nostradame, three years
previous, had inscribed it all in fifty-line stanzas: catastrophe
visits regularly. He gives the Queen
this gift: catastrophe
contained. But she can't decipher. Instead, she puts hand to throat
and looks puzzled. He continues the terrible gifts for years,
this chef and cosmetician, he knows her stomach and face
better than his own: the groaning, the lines
gathering at the corners, what she'd be in the end.
He fights it with her, the regal symmetry
sprung, the end
of her beauty. Ground coral and lapis for catastrophe
dissolved in mutton fat and grief. He writes the lines
and erases them, fifty by fifty, while she smoothes her white throat
with the stuff and wishes her kingdom beyond plague, for the face
of the girl unwidowed, unknowing. She wishes for years
unlike these. But she was bound years
ago to this: her subjects before her, dying, the end
of this rainy country she married into. She will face
the death-cart and the bitter rose-petal pills to stave off catastrophe,
a request caught in her throat:
Please stop writing, stop the endless sets of lines
that unmake us as you make them. She
lines
her coffin with the green silk of her wedding gown. The years
have turned it yellow, just like the skin of her throat.
It's fitting. Two wounds in the jeweled cage of helmet, his end
and hers, famine, river of rats, buboe-catastrophe
and recipes for quince jelly and face
cream all come to him. He meets them
face to face.
They come ordered, the lines
arranged as a skein of angels might, a pageant of catastrophe.
They are never about him, his numbered years--
always some other certain end.
Though he sees his own in the queen's throat,
in the jeweled cage, the catastrophe
of years,
and in her eyes, two wounds. The lines
win out over order in the end, mess like mercy at her
throat.
