Made to Explode
Page 3
into the river of Usk.
We’ll work for an hour, slicing and pressing,
until we’ve filled two bottles to the brim.
What two bodies couldn’t make music,
within such a tight embrace of aluminum?
STILL LIFE WITH SEX
But first, a skull grinning amongst the grapes;
but first, hydrangea moons barely risen;
but first, milky bowls congregating in the sink
and sticky spoons congregating in the bowls;
but first, that vegetal stink; but first,
clank of pipes filling with air; but first,
dirt on your end of the couch; but first,
dirt from your Monday shoes;
but first, a canteen of water;
but first, five lagers;
but first, Magnum P.I.;
but first, Tom Selleck; but first,
kiss me because you clutter the pewter;
kiss me because you track in necessary dirt.
Picture a violin, then add prosciutto.
We are trying to make space and hold it open.
The skull that grins amongst grapes grins at us.
But first, those globes of hydrangea;
there they are, perfect, and cratering to our touch.
HAINS POINT
The old men chide each other to tee up quick, before the rain comes. I want to buy a fountain soda, sit on the porch, and eavesdrop. I want to buy a pitcher of beer. I walk the mini-green, swoops of turf and brick that have been here since 1931. The city assembled this spit over a dozen years from nineteenth-century dredgings. My dad detoured our Cadillac along the channel so we’d see The Awakening, five pieces that hinted at a giant body breaking ground to breathe. The Peace Garden’s funding never came through. The Navy enclosed four acres to build a steel shed, contents unknown, and The Awakening moved to Maryland. The sidewalk is swept with mucky silt and I’m getting mosquito-bit, watching ducks toddle and peck. On the far bank, National glimmers. One plane after another insists on liftoff as the storm eases across the river. The old men chide each other, Go on now. They give each other answers no man gives when a woman does the asking.
WINTER GARDEN PHOTOGRAPH
After Roland Barthes
Barthes withholds this image from Camera Lucida—
Henriette, the five-year-old who grows up to be his mother,
her hands on her hips.
He couldn’t bear that our gaze might find her
ordinary,
as one might find this snapshot
of my grandparents arriving in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Her precise handwriting on the back declares
their “America the Beautiful” tour.
Grandma Jean’s jaunty scarf, Carl in his crisp white shirt—
1990. In 1991,
I pick up the calendar she kept
by her reading chair. Her neat script fills the square of
January 22:
Carl died. Life is over.
The woman in green jacket and green skirt, full throttle,
smiles toward the camera
as she rounds the corner of the terminal,
purse under one arm and blue carry-on under the other.
Because this photograph is not mine to keep, I take
a photograph of it.
Barthes says I am now operator
and referent,
sliver of thumb and palm visibly cradling Kodak print.
The rest of January 1991 stays blank.
February, blank. March, bare.
But then a church meeting is scheduled.
She pencils in a lunch.
Yes, she will come to the recital.
Her cursive wakens the days.
Even in winter, the garden can call itself to bloom.
CARD TABLE
A practical gift for moving to the city:
good cherry squared around black vinyl,
four long legs that fold within itself
as a greyhound does, disappearing into a nap.
Just big enough for a bridge match
if I’d ever had four people willing to kiss knees.
Just big enough to let me call a corner
of that S Street studio my breakfast nook,
stacked with a week’s worth of newspapers
while I ate cereal cross-legged on my futon.
Just big enough to pull out every few years
and complain how small the table was,
too crowded as a desk, too low for my chairs.
In January, we stared at the strange space
wedged between two kitchen doorways.
Might as well try the card table.
We stacked onions there, then potatoes,
then tomatoes and peaches, and it became
the chopping table; stirring table; serving table.
Now, the first morning she is gone,
I see a swipe in the vinyl where a hot dish
burned through, and realize I forgot
to ask for anything—a ring, her sheet music—
so what I have is this reminder
that she, too, was once a girl in a city,
and that she knew I’d always need a table.
IN PRAISE OF PINTOS
Phaseolus vulgaris.
Forgive these mottled punks,
children burst
from the piñata of the New World,
and their ridiculous names
of Lariat, Kodiak, Othello,
Burke, Sierra, Maverick.
Forgive these rapscallions that
would fill the hot tub with ham
while their parents
go away for the weekend,
just to soak in that salt.
Forgive their climbing instinct.
Forgive their ignorance
of their grandparents who
ennobled Rome’s greatest:
Fabius, Lentulus, Pisa, Cicero
the chickpea. Legume
is the enclosure, fruit in pod,
but pulse is the seed.
From the Latin, puls
is to beat, to mash, to throb.
Forgive that thirst. Forgive
that gallop. Beans are the promise
of outlasting the coldest season.
They are a wink in the palm of God.
THE VOW
But never for us the flitch of bacon though,
That some may win in Essex at Dunmow.
So promises the old wives’ tale,
a covenant according to Chaucer:
that if tomorrow I trek to Dunmow Church
and swear before God and congregation
not a fight, no single quarrel,
in 366 days not even once wishing
to be un-married to you,
that hog is ours for the taking.
My love, what
limp victory that would be,
sweet silence of perfect agreement
as we swing a pork trophy between us,
walking the many miles home—
the fatback won, the battle lost.
I reserve my right to a good spat,
to the meat’s spit in flame.
I take joy in choosing you again and again.
LITTLE LOVE POEM
The 6 a.m. sun considers everything,
humming its way past the Capitol.
I reheat yesterday’s coffee,
put lima beans into a pot:
Fordhook, always Fordhook,
drizzle of olive oil, pinch of salt, shake
of chili flakes. The chicken broth
comes to boil for a minute
before I cover, simmer. Soon he’ll wake,
and I’ll ask him to put a record on,
something with no words;
bowls, spoons, a single twist of pepper.
DEATH BY CHOCOLATE
A man wants my take on his novel
where a wife
dies with a peanut in her mouth
after we’ve met her husband, in the act with his secretary
in the passenger seat of a late-life convertible.
A man wants my take on his novel
where the husband’s marital issues are solved
by her anaphylactic collapse after he serves her takeout
spiked with a cashew, and for another 300 pages
he wonders, Was it an accident? Or did I
know? Somewhere out there a man
is writing a novel about a chef with a taste
for adding shrimp paste to curry and his unsuspecting
shellfish-allergic wife, and I will be asked
for my take on it. I have been offered dozens of takes
on my own death. Suggestions abound.
Death by ice cream. Death by cake. Death by cucumber,
though that would take a while;
perhaps gazpacho as a shortcut. Death by mango.
Death by Spanish omelette. Death by dairy,
an abstraction sexy to someone who has never side-eyed
cream brought out slopping toward the coffee;
who has never felt histamine’s palm at her throat,
who says Cheese makes life worth living.
These wives! I get you, women who
did not grow up aspiring to be a plot device.
We almost die a lot. Or: we die a lot,
almost. We’re over it. Our mouths have more to say.
AN ACCOMMODATION
Pistachio’s buds of salt-funk;
cayenne macramé of boiled crawfish;
cantaloupe’s tacky, thin sugar;
the first time I eat a thing
I can eat anything.
The allergy requires initial exposure
before my mast cells gather,
before my body says No.
Let’s consider your need to center me
on the table, to call my portion
naked or plain while offering
others the “real” version.
Let’s examine your suggestion
we put warnings on the cabinets,
attach my name to a list.
First time, I tasted
a kind of kindness. Then
came my second reckoning.
INTERSECTIONALITY
In the diagram, Bob
is a striped blue triangle.
Some people do not like Bob.
Down with stripes.
Down with triangles.
Bob is at the intersection of
stripey-ness and blue-ness,
of triangle-ness and Bob-ness.
Luckily, there are “liberation groups.”
Here is where the model
starts to fail me: maybe liberation
has come in the form of four taxis,
each waiting to carry Bob away
from this intersection.
Bob should not have to choose
any one taxi, I am told.
Or maybe Bob does not
want to go? Bob has noticed
the quality of the bodega’s coffee.
Bob likes this intersection.
Bob can get a pretty good deal
on buying a one-bedroom.
Bob is a striped blue triangle.
Bob is a damn gentrifier.
In 1995, I flunked a Driver’s Ed quiz
on intersections
because I could not model
how traffic proceeds at a four-way stop.
In my head, each car
arrived at the same time.
What happens when you yield
to the car on your right,
who yields to the car on his right,
who yields to the car on her right,
who yields to you?
No one goes anywhere.
The reality,
my teacher once explained,
is someone always claims
the right of way.
Four allies in four cars
meet at a four-way stop,
you know the one,
it’s over by Bob’s bodega.
The woman’s car on my right yields,
the woman’s car on her right yields,
the third car rolls a window down,
then I hear, Do you mind?
We’re in a hurry
for her OIT appointment.
What I call my disability
you call her disease:
treatable, curable, Thank God.
So that must be your daughter,
in the passenger seat?
She looks just like you.
CUSTOMER SERVICE IS
We take pride in serving the
We’re accustomed to servicing the
Please take the attached
Please answer these six
Please answer these eight
This will only be a quick
If microphones don’t reach, then
If ramps are required, then
If you need audio, then
If you need visual, then
We request one week’s
We request one month’s
All reasonable requests will
A flock of surveys is a surveillance.
A stampede of stairs is an architecture.
An expectation of elevators is a favor.
An “oh-crap” of crips is a caucus.
But I have an aunt who is
I had a friend who was
We practice best
We follow the
You have to see our
You have to stand up for
Your help is so
Your answers will be
SAY THE WORD
To be apart, I’m told.
To be asunder.
To be a privative, negative, reversing force.
To be reached only by oaths and curses.
To have black sheep sacrificed in my name
because I’m a god, yes,
as we are all gods on occasion.
To be bodied as I am bodied.
To be rich of earth,
which is to be chronically chthonic.
To be where the gems are—
underground.
To be Dīs. To be Dīs. To be Dīs.
To reject any pickaxe disguised as love.
POP
We call an unpuffed piece
the old maid
but she’s just the one
who read the fine print.
Germ and sugar curled
in her hard hull,
deciding whether
to shake out her sheets.
Sometimes it’s worth it—
pan, oil, flame.
Sometimes you must
hold the steam within you.
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH GEORGE CATLIN
“Generokee”: a term describing one who claims
a distant and unsubstantiated relationship
to an American Indian tribe.
If I’d only ever seen one Catlin,
this would be a different conversation:
the rich red and blue oil paint
of Stu-mick-o-súcks, Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat,
Head Chief, Blood Tribe, which
the Smithsonian catalogs as
Ethnic – Indian – Blackfoot
Dress – ethnic – Indian dress
Recreation – leisure – smoking
Object – other – smoking material
Or the frank gaze and stacked beads
of Koon-za-ya-me, Female War Eagle
(Ethnic – Indian – Iowa).
If there was just one on the wall
I might find it my favorite, amidst
a nineteenth-century blur of bucolic takes on
waterfalls and Manifest Destiny
(Landscape – phenomenon – rainbow).
Instead, I rock back and forth
on the museum’s mezzanine,
trying t
o take in Catlin’s
Indian Gallery—a grid of faces,
all that specificity of name and tribe
hidden beneath a number,
which I may look up within a replica
of Catlin’s own catalog,
as if checking the price on a couch
I’ve admired off the showroom floor.
What I could have noticed, viewing
the display of “his Indians,”
is how alone each subject is kept,
their only counsel his admiring gaze,
or how portraits share warm, puffy light,
a hint of foliage, making it easy to hide
whether painted on expedition
to the Plains or to London,
where he paid his subjects to dance
for the gallery’s crowds.
And yet. And yet
what would we have, if we
did not have this? Here
is that “we,” cozy
as an infected blanket.
So much taken under the decree
of numbered days,
the promised dwindling of “noble
savages.” This occurs to me
not at all in 2002, when
(Ethnic – White – Suburbia)
I buy postcards in the gift shop
from a show I don’t enjoy,
but have been told I’m supposed
to enjoy. A push-pin’s
worth of heritage, and the claim:
One-thirty-secondth, I think.
Cherokee. Maybe Navajo.
BASS PRO SHOPS
Bass Pro Shops began as a counter for worms and bait in the back of a Brown Derby liquor store in Branson, Missouri. Bass Pro Shops now makes over four billion dollars a year. The one in Memphis contains two restaurants, a hundred-room hotel, and America’s tallest freestanding elevator. The one in Harlingen, Texas, has a twelve-lane bowling alley called Uncle Buck’s Fishbowl and Grill.
Uncle Buck’s BBQ sauce is available in the condiments plaza. There are plazas for grills, tents, sleeping bags, footwear, and thermal-lined jackets. Bass Pro Shops offers reels, rods, and terminal tackle for all of your needs. Bass Pro Shops carries Tracker, SeaCraft, and Kenner for all of your needs. Bass Pro Shops has partnered with Remington, Winchester, and Benelli for all of your needs. The shotguns are upright and gleaming. Perhaps this stuffed menagerie of deer and bear should haunt me, but I’m only tired and a little hungry. Once, at a party in Connecticut, I opened a closet and found two mounted zebra heads tucked to the side behind some coats.