What is this moon, this fetid pool of light,
this alabaster shadow of disease
that frames the death mask of a pallid wight,
like swaying gibbet bones in anchored flight,
no longer subject to life's leprosies?
What is this moon, this fetid pool of light
that seeps across the clammy skin of night
through holes where worms have eaten through the frieze
that frames the death mask of a pallid wight?
Its yellow discharge oozes like a blight,
gangrenous on this pockmarked, rotting cheese.
What is this moon, this fetid pool of light
that hauls upon the tides, this satellite
that dares deflect our lives, our certainties?
Who framed the death mask of this pallid wight
that angles with his line; a parasite
eroding solid shores with shifting seas?
What is this moon, this fetid pool of light
that frames the death mask of a pallid wight?
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Author Notes
The villanelle consists of five stanzas of three lines (tercets) followed by a single stanza of four lines (a quatrain) for a total of nineteen lines. It is structured by two repeating rhymes and two refrains: the first line of the first stanza serves as the last line of the second and fourth stanzas, and the third line of the first stanza serves as the last line of the third and fifth stanzas. The villanelle has no established meter, although most 20th-century villanelles have used pentameter. Slight alteration of the refrain line is permissible.
Glossary
A wight: a spirit, ghost, or other supernatural being.
A gibbet: a gallows
Many thanks to Moonwillow for the atmospheric image.
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