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Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

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Linda Rose Parkes

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In the Beginning was Menses

Her blankets thrown carelessly back one morning
He was taken off guard,
realizing how close blood was to the surface.

Sun scooped the washline of cottons but He felt bewildered:
how to handle the heart always pumping.
And the skin stretched transparent over the raw.

It wasn't exactly what He'd had in mind
with all His careful scrapings, His discrete particles.
Salt molecules, atoms of stars,

all those early mornings and late nights
sieving the air - for qualities of light and photosynthesis -
through an oak-leaf colander.

How had He failed to make allowances for such quantities
of blood? He started to dread spills; didn't have the stomach
for the production of knives, nuclear fusion, accidents with harpoons.

Squeamish about bleeding from inside,
He worried a lot about women's menses, the shortness of cycles;
was bothered by smell, the messy tampons

or babies' heads crowning, tearing the tissue.
He hadn't anticipated the way things would leak
but was growing desirous of -:

odd socks snitched on the brambles, millions of trees
blowing; tugging at pegs, a woman's sheets tangy
as lemons and best weather

for running to the top of the hill. Lazing all day,
flat on His back pretending clouds are horses.

There was much more pain than He'd imagined.

 

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