Epergne                                 after Mark Doty I am looking for epergne when I find it, Sunday morning    in my Webster's Unabridged between ensorcell (what desire does to the brain)    and ensphere — what we think the head does to the spirit,    though it might well be the opposite— the soul ensphering the body, the body    meant to contain only what it could, a tenth, of its guiding spirit, the rest    streaming continually out— the way light illuminates the lampshade and spills over the edges—    But the word that stops my search for epergne is ensoul:    where did they find a being without one— what made it necessary to invent a word    for such a concept? Someone once without soul— a body, a bleak house waiting for that happy family of four? (What a parade of ecclesiasts must have    applied for the job—here, no here, let my god be your soul and inspiration....) Is it something slipped    to the baby just before birth or in the slap just after (the soul so deeply asleep it needs slapping awake)?    Definition two "to endow with a soul" is what awes me    (perhaps we're every color and shape of soulless vase awaiting water and blossom, and only a saintly few so graced)    but what stops my breath is "1. to take or put into the soul" as if not the body    but the soul were a receptacle that could be filled with anything—daisies or roses, trash or ashes. I'd want    to be exquisitely careful what I put or allowed put in there—    another job perhaps, for the administers of God. When I think of it, I've had or assumed    scant control over what I've allowed in or what's been tossed in to my soul.    I have been that object, the epergne I was looking for— that sectioned silver ornamental stand or crystal dish at the table's center    meant for people to put food in or take food from—I have not done what the poets have done    which is to give objects or words a soul—a variation on idolatry—or one of the myriad forms of grace?    What the poets have done is to give death  a soul, which I have not done not out of humility, but fear:    once death has soul, if death is the mother of beauty what mercies or cruelties are not possible? ©1998 by April Ossmann First published by The Spoon River Poetry Review