Saturday always means a pail of open oysters and a
gaping plank, over there, in the corner of the wood
where Oger, the staircase-maker, lives.
His wife Octavia washes with the black soap and eats
the raw, chilled comb of a cock killed during the night
by an axe-stroke, on the bakery block.
His drunken son Oscar has a sore throat. He set up a
cutting table in the cabbage patch. He licks the
almanac. It smells bad.
The carpenter has bare fore-arms. He whistles between
his teeth.
He thinks about his brother the peddlar’s tired horse.
He dreams of his daughter Odile, dead at fifteen, from
hemorrhaging.
Heaven is pale, its cheek swollen, with waterpockets
under its eyes and a bandage on its calf.
In the evening, a preserved egg is eaten.
(Paul Colinet)
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Based on Topics: Night Poems, Heaven Poems, Horse PoemsBased on Keywords: almanac, oscar, bakery, axe-stroke, octavia, fore-arms, peddlar