by Diane Seuss
Note to the Reader on Text Size
The rooster went after Sis, so Brian put it in a sack and hit it a few times against a fieldstone.
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Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks
and a Girl
Also by Diane Seuss
It Blows You Hollow
Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open
Four-Legged Girl
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks
and a Girl
Poems
Diane Seuss
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2018 by Diane Seuss
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-806-8
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-996-6
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2018
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953321
Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design
Cover art: Rembrandt van Rijn, Still Life with Peacocks, c. 1639.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
To stillness. To life.
Contents
I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise
Girl in a Picture Frame
Memory Fed Me until It Didn’t
Still Life with Self-Portrait
Young Hare
Still Life with Turkey
Eden: An Outline
Self-Portrait: My Legs
Self-Portrait with the Ashes of My Baby Blanket
Self-Portrait with My Dead Looming behind Me
Self-Portrait with Double Helix
Self-Portrait with Levitation
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
The Knight’s Dream
Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber
The Last Still Life: The Head of Medusa
Walmart Parking Lot
American Still Lifes (the Gothic Sublime in 102 Syllables)
Sentences
Hindenburg
There’s Some I Just Won’t Let Die
Bowl
American Run-On Sentences
I Look at My Face in a Red Mylar Balloon Tied to a Mailbox
Stateline Pastoral
The Hand Has Dropped the Fruit and It’s Painted Where It Falls
I Look Up from My Book and Out at the World through Reading Glasses
Silence Is So Accurate, Rothko Wrote
It Seems at Times That Silence
Still Life with Dictator
The Heroic Penetrates the Quotidian
Silence Again
Memento Mori
Self-Portrait with Herbarium
Self-Portrait with Emily Dickinson (Rebirth of Mourning)
Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid
Self-Portrait under Janis’s Shoe When She Sang “Ball and Chain” at Monterey Pop, 1967
Self-Portrait with Freddie M (Invention of Thunder)
Self-Portrait with Amy (Creation Myth)
Self-Portrait as Mouthpiece of an Anonymous Benefactor
Two Floor Mosaics
Passover Lamb
What Could Be More Beautiful Than Fede Galizia’s Cherries?
Woman Looking at a Table
I Climbed Out of the Painting Called Paradise
Notes
Acknowledgments
“If a peasant painting smells of bacon, smoke, potato steam—fine.”
—Vincent van Gogh
“She is a peacock in everything but beauty.”
—Oscar Wilde
“What kind of fuckery is this?”
—Amy Winehouse
I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise
with the milkweeds splitting at the seams emancipating their seeds
that were once packed in their pods like the wings and hollow bones
of a damp bird held too tightly in a green hand. And the giant jade
moths stuck to the screen door as if glued there. And the gold fields
and stone silos and the fugitive cows known for escaping their borders.
I have lived in a painting called Paradise, and even the bad parts
were beautiful. There are fields of needles arranged into flowers,
their sharp ends meeting at the center, and from a distance the fields
full of needle flowers look blue from their silver reflecting the sky,
or white as lilies if the day is overcast, and there in the distance is a meadow
filled with the fluttering skirts of opium poppies. On the hillside
is Moon Cemetery, where the tombstones are hobnailed or prismed
like cut-glass bowls, and some are shaped so precisely like the trunks of trees
that birds build their nests in the crooks of their granite limbs, and some
of the graves are shaped like child-sized tables with stone tablecloths
and tea cups, yes, I have lived in a painting called Paradise.
The hollyhocks loom like grandfathers with red pocket watches,
and off in the distance the water is ink and the ships are white paper
with scribblings of poems and musical notations on their sides.
There are rabbits: mink-colored ones and rabbits that are mystics
humped like haystacks, and at Moon Cemetery it’s an everyday event
to see the dead rise from their graves, as glittering as they were in life,
to once more pick up the plow or the pen or the axe or the spoon
or the brush or the bowl, for it is a cemetery named after a moon
and moons never stay put. There are bees in the air flying off
to build honeycombs with pollen heavy on their back legs,
and in the air, birds of every ilk, the gray kind that feed from the ground,
and the ones that scream to announce themselves, and the ravens
who feed on the rabbits until their black feathers are edged
in gold, and in the air also are little gods and devils trying out their wings,
some flying, some failing and making a little cream-colored blip
in the sea, yes, all of my life I have lived in a painting called Paradise
with its frame of black varnish and gold leaf, and I am told some girls
slide their fingers over the frame and feel the air outside of it,
an
d some even climb over the edge and plummet into whatever
is beyond it. Some say it is hell, and some say just another, bolder
paradise, and some say a dark wilderness, and some say an unswept
museum or library floor, and some say a long-lost love waits there
wearing bloody riding clothes, returned from war, and some say
freedom, which is a word that tastes strange, like a green plum.
Girl in a Picture Frame
Red velvet she wore, and the rusty casing of a jumper.
Fur collar tight at the throat. A few of the minks
were stripped of their pelts for her, and for her
the gold necklaces and the heavy copper belt
and the ludicrous black hat, big as a tabletop but soft
for her, and the hat band tight around her forehead.
She’s too young for earrings, but she’s wearing them.
One glints as a band of light moves across the window.
She’s fourteen. Her hair is long, and soft and reddish
as a mink. Her eyes unlined and unimpressed, one brow
raised slightly higher than the other. Gaze away;
her gaze will always win. Her interest on the verge
of disinterest, her self-exposure an act of masquerade.
We have painted a frame around her for safe-keeping.
Not barbed wire. Never barbed wire for a girl like her.
If it were wire, she couldn’t rest her hands on it
as she does, the right hand half-shadowed but moving
into light, the left already bathed in it, her thumb’s
reflection in the high varnish of the little white lie
of the false black frame. Forever on the threshold
of climbing over the edge and displaying something
grand, her spindly naked legs or a deformity of the foot
or nothing at all below the hips, a double-amputee:
she moves around on a cart with bright red wheels.
Memory Fed Me until It Didn’t
Then the erotic charge turned off like a light switch.
I think the last fire got peed on in that hotel outside Lansing.
Peed on and sizzled and then a welcome and lasting silence.
Then my eyes got hungry.
They looked at bowls and barn owls and paper clips,
panoramic lavender fields and a single purple spear,
and it was good but not good enough.
My eyes were hungry for paint, like I used to imagine
a horse could taste the green in its mouth
before its lips found the grass.
Then I woke to the words “still life,” not as the after-image
of a dream but as the body wakes and knows it needs
mince pie before the mind has come to claim it.
I craved paint like the pregnant body craves pomegranates
or hasenpfeffer or that sauerbraten made with gingersnaps.
Van Gogh ate paint. At least that’s the myth of van Gogh.
I ate van Gogh, the still lifes of old boots and thick-tongued
irises. Then my eyes followed the trail back, to Dürer
and his plump rabbit, as perfectly composed as a real one,
as if he’d invented rabbits, and Chardin’s dead hare
strung up in a brownish-gold space, its head and ears
flopped onto what appears to be a table, the ears
made of rough bands of white and black and gray
and green-brown paint, the whiskers painted in, the tufts
of fur articulated with white gestures from a thin brush.
And the vanitas paintings of skulls and unspent coins,
and Baugin’s dessert wafers shaped like little flutes,
and Pieter Aertsen’s Butcher’s Stall with the Flight into Egypt
in which a small rendering of the Holy Family
is relegated to the background
while the foreground is loaded with gaudy carnage,
a vat of lard, a pig’s head hung by the snout, cascades
of sausages, strangled hens, and yawning sides of beef.
The huge gory head of a cow is front and center,
directly below the cool blues of the miniature Virgin Mary
handing out alms to the poor. The cow’s cold nose
is so close it makes my eyes water. Its watery eye
gazes back at me and I fall in love. I fall in love again.
Still Life with Self-Portrait
I look at Gijsbrechts’ Still Life with Self-Portrait,
and I want to touch him. I suppose he was a bad man.
Weren’t all men bad back then? Weren’t women
bad as well? Or did they only exist within
the confines of the badness of men
and thus come to be known as good? I have
existed within the confines of the badness
of men. Men have existed within the confines
of my own badness. I’m bad enough to admit
I liked it when men existed within my badness
rather than the other way around.
Gijsbrechts appears to be the kind of bad man
who likes to trick the eye. He favored trompe l’oeil,
optical illusion. In The Reverse of a Framed Painting,
he paints the front of the painting as if
it were the back, complete with wood grain,
framing nails, and a tag—number 36—
seemingly stuck to the canvas with sealing
wax. Aside from this, there is no content.
He has offered you his backside and called it
his frontside, has offered you nothing
and called it something. You’ve known men
like Cornelius Gijsbrechts.
In Still Life with Self-Portrait, he paints
a painting of a painting. It is an unremarkable
still life on what seems to be black velvet.
White grapes with a tendril from the vine
still attached, three peaches, an opened walnut,
and a cut squash. One corner of the velvet
canvas appears to have peeled away from
the frame on which it’s mounted, exposing
the wall, the wooden frame, and the stitched
hem along the reverse side of the fabric.
The still life rests on a little shelf he’s painted
to mimic a real shelf. It holds his pipe, his
tobacco jar, his brushes, and two pegs
on which hang his gummy palette and a rag.
Alongside the painting of the painting
is a tiny self-portrait that seems to be pinned
to the wall as one would pin a dead moth
to a display board. It is ostensibly the artist
himself, his thick, black hair brushing the top
of his shoulders, his white collar turned down
beneath his paunchy face, his eyes not meeting
mine but gazing off over my left shoulder.
With annoyance? I think he looks annoyed.
Or he’s creating the illusion of disinterest.
I’ve known that kind of man. Or he’s thinking,
“This isn’t my real face I’ve painted. She will
never really know me.” A man said something
like that to me once: “You don’t know anything
about me,” a man I’d lived with a long time.
My whole life I’ve wanted to touch men
like Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts,
but they will not let themselves be touched.
Young Hare
Oh my love, Albrecht Dürer, your hare
is not a spectacle, it is not an exploding hare,
it is not a projection of the young hare
within you, the gentleness in you, or a disassembled hare,
nor a subliminal or concealed hare,
nor is it the imagin
ation as hare
nor the soul as a long-eared, soft-eared hare,
Dürer, you painted this hare,
some say you killed a field hare
and brought it into your studio, or bagged a live hare
and caged it so you could look hard at a wild hare
without it running off into thorn bushes as hares
will do, and you sketched the hare
and laid down a watercolor wash over the hare
and then meticulously painted-in all the browns of hare,
toast brown, tawny, dim, pipe-tobacco brown of hare,
olive, fawn, topaz, bone brown until the hare
became dimensional under your hand, the thick hare
fur, the mottled shag, the nobility of the nose, the hare
toenails, black and sharp and curved, and the dense hare
ears, pod-shaped, articulated, substantial, erect, hare
whiskers and eyebrows, their wiry grace, the ruff of hare
neck fur, the multi-directional fur over the thick hare
haunches, and did I say the dark inside the hare
ears, how I want to follow the darkness of the hare
and stroke the dark within its ears, to feel the hare
ears with my fingers, and the white tuft, the hare
anomaly you painted on its side, and the fleshy hare
cheeks, how I want to squeeze them, and the hare
reticence, how I want to explore it, and the downturned hare
eye, it will not acknowledge or appease, the black-brown hare
eye in which you painted the reflection of a window in the hare
pupil, maybe your studio window, in the hare’s
eye, why does that window feel so intimate in the hare’s
unreadable eye, why do I press my face to the window to see the hare
as you see it, raising your chin to look and then back to the hare
