Sep '02 [Home]
 By Degree 365:  Year One of 9/11

Special Selections:Point of Entry


Gail Segal
"Vade Mecum"

 A Headwaters Press/ Big City Lit Print Series Release

 Day One ~. Day Two ~. Day Seven
~. Day Eleven ~. Day Twelve

. .
Vade Mecum*


 Day One


Who can say
what with words
shredded, gnawed at the edges
a friction of use eating away at them?
The whole house, termite-infested,
and the beams
supporting the structure
have been chewed to the ground.


Day Two


It will be the first time
when through the window of night
I see bats flitting a blackness
over the red tiles
and the stone floor a coldness
and the air from the Adige
a coolness and the bats
a manic chemistry of fireworks
without fire, without sparkle
or light or ash light dripping
or ash.

 .  .  . 


Day Seven


One story will raise the soul
from its dead body. So what?
Think of the scars. Think
of the scars stretching
and the incense choking
and the processional of black robes
and stale bread
and the parishioners huffing
Shh-shh when the small boys
in the back row
begin a skirmish
over the yellow truck
wheeling itself up every scarred surface.

 .  .  .


Day Eleven


In the dream
she rides the bull, horned, bucking,
next to a high hedge
and with great thrill,
mastery,
across a vast lawn of the Middle Ages
until,
still gripped by her thighs,
the bull shrinks into dung beetle,
a scarab that turns
into carnelian
and slips
from her open hand
into the long-leafed grass.


Day Twelve


So this is the day that Saturn
drags himself from Taurus,
crouched, limp-legged
backlit by stars that shape
a bull. And traveling
what will you take with you?
Vade mecum.
Or put another way,
what will you reach for first
when from your delicious dream
the smell of smoke
arouses? What will you stuff
into your pockets when
through the floorboards
the flames arch and rise?
(Paleolithic drawing, caves at Lascaux, France.)

 [*] Vade mecum:  anything carried for constant use, a guidebook, manual, bag;
literally, 'Go with me.'

(Gail Segal studied with Ellen Bryant Voigt, Tom Lux, and Michael Ryan as a
student in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, which she completed in 1989. Her
poems have appeared in Chelsea, Gulf Coast, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and
New Orleans Review, and her translations of Italian poet Alfred dePalchi, Addictive
Aversions, were published in book form in 1999 (Zenon Press). Her first
manuscript, In Gravity's Pull, is forthcoming from Shank Painter Press this year.
Segal teaches in the Graduate Film Program at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts.)