WARDROBE BEST DRESSED: NATALIE SHAPERO'S "THE ENGLISH END"

The English End

Come to me now and I will, as the house

where Rilke wrote the Duino Elegies,

give you a place to sleep and make you sad.

I have done this more than was expected.

I have inhabited myself for years

like some old Gothic castle left in my care.

My heart, a bust I steadied myself against.

A bookcase spun. More than I knew was there.

If I love you,

know you are also loved

by all the whisper rooms I’ve lived with, long

and unaware. Know it, please,

in German.

Their word for change sounds like the English END.

I thought the Archaic Torso of Apollo

was instructing YOU MUST END YOUR LIFE.

“The English End” appeared in Natalie Shapero’s book, No Object, available from Saturnalia Books. Purchase your copy today!

Natalie Shapero is the author of No Object (Saturnalia, 2013), and her poems have appeared recently in The Awl, Copper Nickel, Pinwheel, TYPO, and elsewhere. She lives in Gambier, OH, where she is a Kenyon Review Fellow.

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Lyric Dunagan. Dunagan is the Development Assistant at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and a graduate of the University of Tennessee. She was awarded the Bain Swiggett Poetry Prize in 2013, and has been published in The Volta’s Evening Will Come. She is currently waiting to hear back from various MFA programs and hopes to begin graduate school in Fall 2014.