Nothing would content the crows ahead of me in the winter storms, save that I should appoint a day for myself to be rebuilt like a snow elephant. I set a date ahead, prepared a room. I opened the front door of the abandoned chateau in the late morning, and borrowed a skin with some shades from a fairer in Spain. I wished to see whether my appearance would accord with the description: the noble torso, the sloping head, the long and graceful neck, big eyes in a dark husk, and black ringlets. This gargoyle.
Face it! This likeness of a truly imperial dignity was true. However, I remained fixed like a statue in its niche. I already seemed to have obtained a proof, all this time been sitting motionlessly on a tall stool, a Sotheby’s selection after the new price was fixed in the air
and to remain everything spoilt from the heart’s content.
I sat in its shades, aerating the soil below the snow field,
I sat near the berth, where the crows were still hanging,
in a position of almost preternatural erectness.
——
Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah is the author of the new hybrid works, The Sun of a Solid Torus, Conductor 5, Genus for L Loci, and Handlebody. His individual poems are widely published and recently appeared in Rigorous, Beautiful Cadaver Project Pittsburgh, The Meadow, Juked, North Dakota Quarterly, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Sandy River Review, Strata Magazine, Atlas Poetica, Modern Haiku, etc. He is an algebraist and artist and lives in the southern part of Ghana, Spain, and the Turtle Mountains, North Dakota.