Cuirass Or Catafalque? (A Prose Poem) Poem by Denis Mair

(for a digital collage by James Koehnline, posted Jan.14,2025)
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Looking at James Koehnline's picture of imaginary undersea creatures, my noggin started riffing on words like 'carapace' and 'casque.' A living thing crafts a seemingly fanciful covering to protect its vulnerable innards, sort of like an ornate treasure chest. Being encased in such proud armor ('cuirass') , the creature swaggers through times of blood and thunder. Ultimately the undissolved remains will remain like a 'catafalque'--- a fancy casket displayed as a memorial. The hypertrophied covering will become death's cenotaph and loom in the land of the living. By a wild coincidence, right around the time I was jotting down those 'C's, my friend John Olson was writing a prose poem, taking a riff on 'M-words' in a different direction. Apropos of carapaces, Fabienne Collignon writes: 'The fetish is a carapace: it is a fixed thing—it endures; it has an originating event—and a thing which fixes, has ordering power.' Mmm... mm-hmm... hmm-mm.