The Ancestor

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April
hereditary weakness
thrush
loss of money
a false statement
morbid dependency
staggering sickness
champerty
megrims
paranoia
an overdose
imprisonment
instable furniture

– Madame Weyrd.

 

The Ancestor

Wore boar hide, admired himself in polished tin

And in the waxed ivory cheeks of his daughters,

Sunk barbed hooks into their hamstrung calves,

Bemoaning their thin, pink blood

(Gifts, all that he himself had given them).

And ignored their pains upon horseback riding.

He would wake up the estate with hunter’s horns

In the dead of night, when there was no hunt

And drank by the barrel until he was flammable.

He would storm the gardens, wood axe raised,

To defend his title from Franks and Romans,

Or the Goths, or the Picts, or the Entitled Poor.

Although most bets made were on his scarlet fever,

Or his pagan love of crushed flowers and tonics,

In the end it was an exotic flatfish that lodged itself

Inside his hot pipe. And so, his house watched on:

His third and fifth wives quarrelling over legacies,

Waving his drunken paper promises overhead,

His sons wrestled for trinkets and land-plots,

The niece who painted forgot to look up from her easel

Until it collapsed, revealing her subject on his back,

The birdcages around his supine throne set alight with noise

A round of cawing applause rattled the room,

Legs akimbo, his face was cross-eyed and hurt

As his house descended around his blue-ing ears.

New Project: Poems for Edward Gorey’s Fantod Pack

From Moth & Candle: ‘The Fantod Pack is an Oracle deck designed by author and illustrator, Edward Gorey (1925-2000).’ Published October 11th 1995 by Pomegranate Europe (first published 1969).

From Goodreads: ‘Edward Gorey’s trademark sense of impending doom is nowhere more darkly humorous than in this, his version of a tarot card deck. Each of the 20 cards forecasts a list of outcomes for the user ranging from the merely unpleasant (loss of hair, breakage, thwarted ambitions) to the downright horrible (catarrh, spasms, shriveling). The 32-page booklet provides interpretation of the cards courtesy of one Madame Groeda Weyrd, who Gorey tells us “is of mixed Finnish and Egyptian extraction, has devoted her life to divination, and is the author of, among a shelf of other works, Floating Tambourines, a collection of esoteric verse, and The Future Speaks Through Entrails.” Who but Gorey to make mirth from a kaleidoscope of catastrophe?’

I will pull a card from the deck at random, then write a poem based on the image and on Madame Groeda Weyrd’s interpretation of it, as shown on the left under the picture.