Pronkstilleven Harbinger, by Rachel Bates

Still Life in an Architectural Setting, by Jan Fyt and Erasmus Quellinus the Younger (Belgium) c. 1645

Pronkstilleven Harbinger 

A brooding peacock, God-like, austere, 
presides over a mutilated menagerie 
while a milieu of mutts prowl at the side 
and a mendicant monkey scratches the scraps, 
its awkward presence offset 
by an anachronistically plated lobster 
and a parrot’s living brightness, 
its judgemental beak 
beckons a verdict, 
but is it vengeance or revenge 
for the execution it perches above? 

A violent cornucopia 
of corpses piled high. 
Caracasses collapse into each other. 
seasons mingle in the autumnal, rooted up vegetables, 
voluptuous summer fruits 
lasciviously spilling from their gaudy bowls, 
cascading toward 
the boar’s severed, leaking head 
staining the deer’s rump, 
a tangle of birds in a hare’s hide, 
their feathers, flightless and down-soft, 
splay out – a plumage parade. 
​
And all the while these beings died for living 
while their living counterparts live for dying 
because the nude woman sulking in the background 
below the crumbling balustrade 
and the dreary drape are ghostly harbingers 
of who will return to retrieve the lute 
left behind in this catastrophic chaos, 
a calamitous celebration of human 
ostentatious waste and ruin.

Rachel Bates

​Rachel Bates is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Curry College. She resides in Boston, MA, but she considers herself an Appalachian first and foremost. Her poetry has appeared in Appalachian Review, Broad River Review, and among other journals.