by David Lehman
The code, simply, degenerates. On a table,
*
the head of Robespierre, Fouquier de Tinville.
They are here still, some personality crawls
like an animal into its tiny hole, fits itself there, invites us in,
then repels us: back, back: we are the kings here still and you
cannot join us, and when they marched the busts of the ministers
from Curtius’s house (“They demanded,” he wrote Tussaud, “insistently
the citizens”), the busts were burned, were violently attacked.
The real has no limits, and still, is full of limit.
We think the heart matters. We think the breath,
too, and they do, that is what the wax says, and then
denies it: you are a king, too, and if you have loved him so long
by his symbol, here is something more exact.
Otherwise, why keep a real
guillotine crouched in the corner, why real
period clothes, real blood-stained shoes, no glass
so that when you go to the bathroom later
you are surprised to see the face in the mirror
twist into its expressions?
And the long corridors opened, and the doctors moved their hands
across my mother’s breasts, her hips, they marked on charts the places
that were familiar. We used to joke
about the pesticides her father used, little silver canister swinging
at his hip. You could hear how close he was
in the garden by that panicked clatter, the stupid
immigrant. The tomatoes were silver after he’d finished.
And the radiation after X’s polio. And the pills
the doctors pushed for Y. And the chemicals with which they infused
our napkins, our pencils, our mattresses, our milk—
*
Look how the wax imbibes our novelty and richness.
It takes on some of our power as well, the blood paint
of the Christ statue seeming
to run, to swell. For centuries they argued
how to divide him, man or God, till Calenzuoli shaped
a wax man’s head then split the face
to find it: scalp flayed over the intact portion of his crown, flesh halo
where the passive gray eyes flicker and the stripped muscles gleam.
What is man is all red and red, tendon, cartilage
glimmering with a sheen of beef fat,
while the rest is the expression
of a patience endured through pain: our image
of the image of Christ, the exactness
of his interiority, the wet formulations of the mind.
“Eye, nose, lip / the tricks
of his frown, his forehead; nay,
the pretty dimples of his chin and cheek—
Would you not deem it breath’d? And that those veins
did verily bear blood?”
*
I had noticed that they took
certain patients’ families into a room
during the operations. Separated them
from where the others waited,
so it was obvious when the doctors came
and led a group into the little room, and shut the door.
You could hear the muffled something, the scuttle
in the dark that signaled pain,
which was why I began to sing, It’s fine,
during the operation, cheerful, witless, It’s fine, it’s fine,
so long as they don’t take us into that little room
which is what they did, three hours later, the doctor
and his trout-faced resident.
We have some news,
the doctor said, and as the door shut my father
turned to me with a look that read,
I will never forgive you.
So many models, so many bits of grotesquery—
In the museum is Robert-François Damiens who,
in 1757, was ordered to have his flesh ripped
with pincers and, by proclamation, “on those places poured
molten lead, boiling oil, resin, wax,
body quartered by horses, his limbs consumed by fire.”
The portrait of this pain, in its own way, a kind of compliment.
To make this man’s suffering significant because
prohibitive, because
it would be the most intense form of privacy imaginable.
They tortured a person
out of the body that they killed, and then they changed this:
Guillotin remodeling the blade to sculpt the new
blood-wet window through which his “patients”
would look. To turn each death anonymous, communal—
“Passenger,” wrote Robespierre’s epitaph, “lament not his fate,
for, were he living,
thou would’st be dead.” Insert yourself
inside this window. Crowds
pushing against soldiers, shrubbery, platforms, crowds
looking and feeling at another
just like themselves.
I am a man because I suffer,
the thin gas voice leaks inside the chamber, or is it,
I am a man because I make others
suffer in my place?
*
How much enough to call it evidence?
I thought my father would faint when he heard the results.
The insides seamed as if with. The diamond of the flesh turned into,
turned out of, it was hard to tell.
You have to imagine, the doctors said.
To spend an afternoon combing these words. To walk
among the white pillars of the Temple of Poseidon
looking for the name some poet etched there once
as a kind of afterthought, rows and rows
of white stone, and no one could find it:
so many others had added names, dates, the pillars
had become a kind of cemetery,
but I was desperate for the remnant, the authority.
I needed to trace my fingers through the name, to step inside of it.
How deep the eye. How deep the knife, the hand, the imagination—
And once again we took off
coat and sweater, blouse and skirt. Someone came
and washed her scent off. The oils of her hair.
How much further and still be her?
They put a knife in. They took out lining
and consciousness, tissue, time, they took out speech,
then brought it back. And now
they give us another body, a littler one, and we start
the process over in reverse. The lenses, blouse, shoes, skirt,
makeup, hair oils. And added to it, the little
rubber breast padding for what’s been lost—
I should have looked, like Tussaud, with my glasses
and my lock of hair.
I should have stood stretching out my hand for the perspective,
knowing it was only a thought that night that I
was the killer, I had the knife in hand, I was taking out the heart
and tongue, I was cutting off the fingers, it was me doing it,
that blood, that distance—
Nothing scraped at the floorboards. Nothing blew down and whistled
in the street. And somewhere an image
in the mind’s blank cavern: the body’s senseless
clawing out of color, its muds and greens and pallid lights.
You cannot tell just what the body is
or where the corruption will take it:
it is like trying to pinpoint the soul
as it animates the body: it exists, like a painting does,
between the real and imagined, where the wax itself
comes back to life.
They asked us to look
and unders
tand the stain, the shadow on the X-ray
but the shadow was too much a shape
to be an idea as yet. We looked, and the shadow
turned into fist, a face, it blossomed
like a Japanese lotus in a dish of water, it turned
beautiful and remote, black sun around which
the ghostly others lost duration, turned themselves in orbit—
No, the doctors said. And urged us to paint
the image thickly over, keep her untouched color
and shade, hue that recalls the vivid flesh
and just its opposite, to let dirt scrub into the cracks—
After the operations, she is
not only human but the state
of working toward humanity, away from it,
while in my mind her face can be remolded to last
longer than wood, longer than stone, to last
as long as there is wax, her image always at the point
of just emerging. Let me look. Here
are the cells with their rotten codes.
Here are breasts, belly, the still-pink organs ripe and flush:
myself liquifying into the family’s
deathless increase.
I can see the swelling
in armpit, groin, the milk glands ripened in the breast. Passenger:
I had no idea what it meant,
lingering alone, black-eyed in doorways—
Take off the vest. Peel off the fragments
that are left, the sweat-stained
shoes and blouse, glasses, sweater: let us trace our fingers
through the names, let us add them to us, so that later
we can take it all away.
The drumroll is echoing in the chamber. It takes me down
where so many have gathered, crowds upon crowds
for the blood-wet window
through which each citizen must look.
The crowd shudders as the cord is cut. Shock
that travels through everybody. Makes a family out of every
body. Then isolates the patient.
They held my little X-ray up to the light and.
The king is dead. Do you believe it?
Passenger: touch this pillar for a sign.
Someone has to raise the head.
Someone has to imagine the other side.
from Witness
MARY RUEFLE
Middle School
I went to Cesare Pavese Middle School.
The gymnasium was a chapel dedicated to loneliness
and no one played games.
There was a stained glass window over the principal’s desk
and innumerable birds flew against it,
reciting Shelley with all their might,
but it was bulletproof, and besides,
our leaders were never immortal.
The classrooms were modeled after motel rooms,
replete with stains, and in remedial cases
saucers of milk on the floor for innumerable cats,
or kittens, depending on the time of year.
In them we were expected to examine ourselves and pass.
The principal himself once jumped off the roof
at noon, to show us school spirit.
Our mascot was Twist-Tie Man.
Our team The Bitter Herbs.
Our club The Reconsiderers.
It was an honor to have gone,
though a tad strict in retrospect.
You have probably heard that we all became janitors,
sitting in basements next to boilers
reading cheap paperback books of Italian poetry,
and never sweep a thing.
Yet the world runs fine.
from Conduit
DON RUSS
Girl with Gerbil
Out of the no-place
of her not-yet-need she dreams
herself. Unmoved face of the deep
her mirror,
she sees as much as says
I am that I am. I make me now what first
made me: love renewed, bound up,
embodied—always life come burning
back. I prepare my house—
if cardboard, straight and true, a shoebox
Kleenex-bedded, riddled through
with stately constellations.
In time—in the growing
fullness of my time—I’ll know myself
in knowing another. Some other one
and only me.
from The Cincinnati Review
KAY RYAN
Playacting
Early tribal cultures, while celebrating their rites of initiation or sacrifice, retained a very precise and subliminal awareness that the compulsive extremes to which they went . . . were in essence mere playacting, even though the performance could sometimes approach the point of death.
—W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo
Something inside says
there will be a curtain,
maybe or maybe not
some bowing, probably
no roses, but certainly
a chance to unverse
or dehearse, after all
these acts. For some
fraction of the self
has always held out, the
evidence compounding
in a bank becoming
grander and more
marble: even our
most wholehearted
acts are partial.
Therefore this small
change, unspendable,
of a different metal,
accruing in a strange
account. What could it
be for but passage out?
from The Threepenny Review
MARY JO SALTER
The Gods
I always seem to have tickets
in the third or fourth balcony
(a perch for irony;
a circle of hell the Brits
tend to call “The Gods”),
and peer down from a tier
of that empyrean
at some tuxedoed insect
scrabbling on a piano.
Some nights there’s a concerto,
and ranks of sound amass
until it’s raining upward
(violin-bows for lightning)
from a black thundercloud.
A railing has been installed
precisely at eye level—
which leads the gaze, frustrated,
still higher to the vault
of the gilt-encrusted ceiling,
where a vaguely understood
fresco that must be good
shows nymphs or angels wrapped
in windswept drapery.
Inscribed like the gray curls
around the distant bald spot
of the eminent conductor,
great names—DA VINCI PLATO
WHITTIER DEBUSSY—
form one long signature,
fascinatingly random,
at the marble base of the dome.
It’s more the well-fed gods
of philanthropy who seem
enshrined in all their funny,
decent, noble, wrong
postulates, and who haunt
these pillared concert halls,
the tinkling foyers strung
with chandeliered ideals,
having selected which
dated virtues—COURAGE
HONOR BROTHERHOOD—rated
chiseling into stone;
having been quite sure
that virtue was a thing
all men sought, the sublime
a thought subliminally
fostered by mentioning
monumentally.
All men. Never a woman’s
name, of course, although
off-shoulder pulchritude
gets featured overhead—
and abstractions you might go
to women fo
r, like BEAUTY
JUSTICE LIBERTY.
Yet at the intermission,
I generally descend
the spiral stairs unjustly
for a costly, vacant seat
I haven’t paid for. Tonight
I’ve slipped into D9.
The lights dim. Warm applause
and, after a thrilling pause,
some stiff-necked vanities
for a moment float away—
all the gorgeous, nameless,
shifting discordances
of the world cry aloud; allowed
at last, I close my eyes.
from The Common
LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ
The Afterlife
I dreamed I was in the afterlife, it was so crowded,
hordes of people, everyone seeking someone, staggering
every which way.
Who should I search for? The answer came quick: my mother.
I elbowed my way through strangers till I found her, worn,
like the day she died.
Mother, I cried, and threw my arms around her, but she
wasn’t happy to see me. Her arms hung limp. Help me,
I said. You’re my mother!
There are no mothers here, she said, just separate souls.
Everyone looks for their mother. I searched for mine, and found her
searching for her mother,
and so on, through the generations. Mothers, she said,
fathers, families, lovers are for the place you came from.
Here we’re on our own.
Here is no help, no love, only the looking. This
is what death means, my child, this is how we pass
eternity, looking
for the love we no longer know how to give. I shuddered
myself awake. And yet—my child, she said, my child.
Or did I only dream
that word, dream within a dream?
from River Styx
FREDERICK SEIDEL
Rain
Rain falls on the Western world,
The coldest spring in living memory everywhere.
Winter in mid-May means the darling buds of May uncurled
On an ice-cold morgue slab, smilingly shaking loose their beautiful hair.
London rains every day anyway.
Paris is freezing. It’s May, but Rome is cold.
Motorcycles being tested at the factory in Varese north of Milan are gray
Victims screaming in place and can’t get out and won’t get sold.
It’s the recession.
It’s very weird in New York.
Teen vampires are the teen obsession,
Rosebud mouths who don’t use a knife and fork.
