Black wine fills an amphora,
inarticulate wine without sting,
covering thoughts and thoughts, like oil
rising in a barrel, level over level.
From the shattered west, a wine wind escapes.
I carry under my tongue a fermented night,
an ooze of unwilling grapes:
the same evening rising in all throats and brains,
the same musk from purple armpits,
the same moisture drying on the hair of the dead,
the same night filling the urn of the sky.
Black Wine
Black Wine
By Patricia Nell Warren
Prairie Schooner, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter 1958), p. 309
Biography
Patricia Nell Warren was born in 1936 and grew up on the historic Grant-Kohrs Ranch at Deer Lodge, Montana, which is now a national historic site. She spent 20 years working as a Reader’s Digest editor. As author of both fiction and nonfiction, she has published 10 books, including the NY Times bestseller The Front Runner. She has also written for magazines, both mainstream and LGBT. She blogs at Bilerico.com and SBNation, and wrote a column on the politics of AIDS for A & U Magazine for 12 years.Her most recent book is the award-winning nonfiction anthology My West: Personal Writings on the American West (Wildcat Press).