“I was invited to contribute to an anthology of ekphrastic poems on the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and fell into a research hole. In my notes for the poem on The Temptation of St Anthony (c. 1501), I find this:
Smack in the centre of the painting sits a severed foot on a white towel, a representation of ergot poisoning, the result of a fungus in grains, particularly rye seed. Ergotism was epidemic in Bosch’s era and persists today on a much lesser scale. The fungus prevents blood flow to the extremities, which in turn causes tissue to rot and blacken. The torturous burning sensations of this process gave ergotism the sobriquets ‘hellfire’ and ‘St. Anthony’s Fire.’ Other strands of ergotism cause seizures, muscular contractions, delirium and hallucinations, which may have played a role in the behaviour of the girls persecuted in the Salem Witch Trials.
I grew up half an hour away from Salem and always puzzled over what happened there, but I’ve also always been surprised by how often people underestimate teenagers. The anthology never came about, but I am glad the poem did!”
Some miles from Salem I ran shoeless through snow, spilling.
Red wine pinked our trail along the Charles River where my uncle died.
The city was stopped, muffled and snow-blind,
adults long evaporated—the city never darkens in a snowstorm
but becomes absent. We filled all the spaces
with our suggestions, we were hilarious and unregulated.
Somewhere in snow I lost my red flats. I loved them.
We were a bright gang, and everything was hysterical.
I reached for a girl—she was late teens, I was early.
Six o’clock ringing from Old North Church. Cardinals
and crows trapped in white. My feet never felt the cold.
She piggy-backed me over the Fiedler bridge,
I must have been singing. Our cheeks appled up
in the elevator. My toes left feral marks on the carpet.
Oh how they burned when they came to life and how I danced,
hopping foot to foot! I would do anything to make it stop.
She threw me on the bed and began to chafe them
and I rolled my eyes back so far I could see pinned above my bed
the tshirt Billy Idol signed for me at Strawberries Records and Tapes.
I giggled through yelps and she warmed my feet
with her tongue. At midnight we made rye toast,
tomato soup, gulping mugs of water so we wouldn’t
have headaches in the morning. Our lips burned
dark from kissing. When we woke up
the plows were doing their work, scraping.
Phones ringing, everything ordinary again.
