by Diane Seuss
on the page, the thin hair of your brush and your own hair
waving gold down your back, hair I see as you see the hare.
In the hare’s eye you see me there, my swaying black hair.
Still Life with Turkey
The turkey’s strung up by one pronged foot,
the cord binding it just below the stiff trinity
of toes, each with its cold bent claw. My eyes
are in love with it as they are in love with all
dead things that cannot escape being looked at.
It is there to be seen if I want to see it, as my
father was there in his black casket and could not
elude our gaze. I was a child so they asked
if I wanted to see him. “Do you want to see him?”
someone asked. Was it my mother? Grandmother?
Some poor woman was stuck with the job.
“He doesn’t look like himself,” whoever-it-was
added. “They did something strange with his mouth.”
As I write this, a large moth flutters against
the window. It presses its fat thorax to the glass.
“No,” I said, “I don’t want to see him.” I don’t recall
if I secretly wanted them to open the box for me
but thought that “no” was the correct response,
or if I believed I should want to see him but was
too afraid of what they’d done with his mouth.
I think I assumed that my seeing him would
make things worse for my mother, and she was all
I had. Now I can’t get enough of seeing, as if I’m paying
a sort of penance for not seeing then, and so
this turkey, hanged, its small, raw-looking head,
which reminds me of the first fully naked man
I ever saw, when I was a candy striper
at a sort of nursing home, he was a war veteran,
young, burbling crazily, his face and body red
as something scalded. I didn’t want to see,
and yet I saw. But the turkey, I am in love with it,
its saggy neck folds, the rippling, variegated
feathers, the crook of its unbound foot,
and the glorious wings, archangelic, spread
as if it could take flight, but down,
downward, into the earth.
Eden: An Outline
I. The question has been can I accommodate this Eden
A. Without apples or Adam
B. The only thing slithering, the black sky wriggling free of the stars
C. The smoke tree
1. hazy poofs of rusty fuzz
2. like a circle of unshaved redheads in mid-striptease
D. Not hyacinths, not hydrangeas
1. but six-foot-tall stalks covered in unlanguaged vulgarities
2. put my ear close and hear something like Fwahhh
a. Fwahhh darling
3. the lipsticked center
4. stamen the color of cream beaten toward butter
E. Smoke tree sitting back and blowing smoke rings
II. The erotic as Eden
A. In grade school a kid said the clitoris is a pip or a pearl
B. He said fuck had to do with a finger
1. and a Dixie cup
C. Then I learned that women were flowers
1. and fucking had to do with pollination
2. and bee stings
3. sometimes the stinger gets stuck inside
a. that’ll kill a bitch
III. What if Eden is a storage container for withheld wisdom
A. Withheld withheld withheld
B. My grandmother at 92 letting tears rim her little fox eyes about how her husband, after all those ducks and geese and heaving the mess of bluegills on the porch for her to clean, decided to give up hunting
1. his glass eye finally won the argument about killing it had been having with the good eye
2. after all those pinfeathers, she said
a. and let out a long withheld sigh
IV. The white-tailed bird comes close until it decides to be afraid
A. I see the mechanism of fear
1. not a gear in the brain but an old decision that digs a grave that erodes into a canyon until nearly everything
a. falls in
B. Fear, with its largesse, its spangled silver gown, its icy bracelets
C. Worry, the little sister in dress-up clothes, believing if she’s only alert enough she can detoxify the snake
V. I want no Eden without my mother and sister in it
A. If my mother and sister live outside the fence
1. I live outside the fence
B. My mother climbing the ladder and pulling rotten leaves out of the eaves
C. My sister using her index finger like a hook to pull the blood clots out of the mouths of the dead
1. or the impacted turds from the asses of the demented and insane
D. If I can welcome them in
1. I will find a way to welcome them in
VI. Like a dog in winter, those inside the gates want out, those outside the gates want in
A. Did I tell you about my niece who moved to Orlando to get away from the soybean fields
1. she got a job taking tickets at Disney World
2. her husband, a pipefitter at SeaWorld
a. “these days,” he said, “it’s all about serving the dolphins, the dolphins don’t serve you”
3. in the dead of winter they packed up and moved back home
a. jerked the girl out of school, she was finally understanding fractions
b. unpacked the truck
i. trampoline
ii. saltwater aquarium
iii. the dog, Girly, etc.
c. and started planning a trip to Disney World
VII. The problem with Eden is that it is eternal
A. It’s like that Twilight Zone episode
1. no, not that one, the other one
2. the one with the train on a circular track
VIII. The problem with Eden is letting yourself have it
A. Even after you’ve wrecked it
1. it comes crawling toward you with its purple mouths
a. like an army of beaten children
2. like a ruined dog
a. it puts its head in your lap and gives you its stillness
3. it comes buzzing back
a. like a purple-throated bird with a hypodermic beak
i. obsessed with your sweetness
Self-Portrait: My Legs
If these legs could talk they’d tell you about Munich.
They’d say “Paris. No one says ‘Paris’ anymore.”
They’d take you on a slow voyage across the channel
from Hoek van Holland to Harwich, drinking all night
with a red-faced East German man who couldn’t hear
nor speak. And the British soldier, his narrow
bed and the smell of the pomade in his hair
that marked me for days.
If these legs could talk. All those late-night walks
from E. 7th St. to Sammy Wo’s for a whole
steamed fish split between the two of us,
and its eyes, and its lips, and our lips,
and back even further to the summer
I worked as a cocktail waitress on the island.
I was eighteen. Sometimes I’d take the midnight ferry
to the mainland because I could.
I’d sleep in my sleeping bag near the big lake, on the ground.
And the night, as I made the crossing,
it was just me and the hotel magician below deck,
and he offered to hypnotize me for free.
The floor of the ferry was covered in dead luna moths.
That trance he put me in lasted for hours, days.
Maybe he never brought me back, maybe I never woke up
and all of the years since have
been an illusion,
as when my right leg shattered like a mirror
and they had to put it back together with titanium
rods and screws. You’ll always be in pain,
the doctor said, and yes, my legs would tell you
if they could talk, it’s true.
Self-Portrait with the Ashes of My Baby Blanket
Ashes, because she set fire to it in the burn barrel.
Leave her alone, with your newfangledness.
I was a clingy, fearful thumb-sucker, and she knew I needed reinventing.
She tore it away and I screamed and she burned it.
Begone, soft, pale yellow. She knew if I kept it I’d stumble over it
the rest of my life, how far I would travel without it,
and how many strange birds I would trap
in the story of its burning.
Self-Portrait with My Dead Looming behind Me
Mikel, my dad, and Kev, who I nicknamed Bunny
though he buried his softness so deep within
and came across as dangerous, an addict with his knife
and gun and syringe, who once knocked me
across the room for paying back the money he borrowed
from the family with the fat baby who lived on the ground
floor. I’ve forgiven him. My father, he was perfect
and beautiful, his head tilted like Christ’s on the deathbed
pillow, there is nothing to forgive. And Mikel, perfect too,
and so gentle and soft there would have been no irony
in calling him Bunny, so why bother with a nickname?
They fan behind me like the tail of a strange bird,
or like a deck of cards in the hands of a fly-by-night
magician: Pick a card, he says. Any card.
Self-Portrait with Double Helix
Memory returns to me our last encirclement, bones of Mikel’s back
beneath my hands. Did I scream all the way to the airport, Alan Martinez,
as you drove with virtuosic madness, and the top down, the old Fiat,
corkscrewed roads leading to the ludicrous interstate and the blue-edged
runway where machines roar as they’re forced to defy, again and again,
gravity? In my hands, the book Mikel gave me, my inheritance he said,
Kenneth Patchen. He’d read me a few lines before handing it over:
we shall not be there when death reaches out his sparkling hands
there are so many little dyings that it doesn’t matter which of them is death.
The book was used, some of the pages worn through like moth wings
when they’ve been handled. It’s in their DNA to elude handling,
and in our DNA to handle them anyway. You’ll forget my voice,
Mikel said, but it coils through me still, like that year we worked
in the bedspring factory, our hands constellated with puncture wounds
from the sharp ends of the copper wire as we fastened spiral after spiral
to cold metal bedframes where someday mattresses would be flung
for cheap deathbeds. After Mikel died, his face lesioned royal purple,
I dreamed a spiral staircase made of the white-blue stuff of stars,
the whole thing spinning at an even pace as if automated, not so much
a staircase as a coiled ladder, and on each rung a soul, miniscule, giving off
a dull glow like a lit cigarette far down the street during a power outage.
Self-Portrait with Levitation
Embodiment has never been my strong suit.
All right, I flew when I was five. Levitated, I guess.
Woke to a sensation of everlastingness, my face
maybe two inches from the ceiling. Floated
there as if in a warm sea. It happened often
until I was ten, when I had the thought
that human beings can’t fly and was dropped,
as if from the beak of a large owl, onto the floor.
I was banged up. Cuts and bruises.
From then on, inhabiting my body felt shameful,
like I’d been ejected from the Garden and was
sentenced to a life of peeing and wiping,
hoisting and plugging and unplugging. I’m
thinking that idle travel is a lot like flying,
an enchanting escape from being where you
belong. Some hotel in some city, a bed
swankier than your bed at home, no dead
person’s socks flattened at the bottom
of the hamper. As my mother would say
when asked where she went when she took
a ride alone: “I drifted.” To belong to the land
and the people that made you is itchy
as hand-knitted wool. Even the word “wool”
made my old friend KK want to pull her eyes
out of their sockets. She told me that
when we were nine or ten. All I had to do
to slay her was to say it: “wool.” These things
I know of her: I know she wet her pants
far into her teens. I know that under her clothes
she had eczema. I know her mother dyed
her hair black and wore sweat shields in her
blouses. I know she was Italian, that they ate
spaghetti and meatballs several times a week,
but I was never invited to sit at the table. I know
KK’s dad had a vise on a workbench in the garage,
a good tool for opening hickory nuts and squeezing
the heads of Barbies. I know Barbie and Ken
were eunuchs. I know my uncle smoked
while he was on oxygen and that there were fetal
chickens in baby food jars on the windowsill
of his house. I know Freddie cornered my mother
in the garage, Dick made obscene phone calls
to her after she was widowed young, that Bob
Buck peeked in our windows, that some of the boys
in the neighborhood lived alone and raised themselves,
most in grounded travel trailers. Chuck. Leonard.
Rick. Dorian. I know that Bob’s Country Club
was really not a country club. It was a bar on a dirt road
with good cheeseburgers and fried mushrooms.
I know the White House was also a bar, on Pucker St.
That my great grandmother farted all the way across
the cemetery as she walked to the outhouse. I know
she read the newspaper upside down. I know her husband
hit a guy over the head with a frozen fish, killing him
instantly, that he went on the lam for years,
sending cash home in envelopes with no return
address, only to discover later on a clandestine trip
home for Christmas that his victim hadn’t died at all,
had only been knocked unconscious for a few minutes
and actually woke up an improved version of himself.
I could go on, but you catch my drift. Even when I woke
from sodium pentothal my mother was there waiting for me,
and when I opened my eyes I cried like a premature
baby. There isn’t a Holiday Inn Express that can
save me. Not a flight to St. Louis, which my granddad
called Sink Louis, not even a flight to Los Angeles,
where my dad was born and lived next door
to Disney before he was rich and famous, and watched
Walt invent and revise the Mouse in their shared
garage converted into a drawing studio. Where
my dad dropped out of high school and joined
the navy. Boarded the ship that would eventually
kill him. To confess to embodiment is to become
a tender of graves, like my mother, for whom
grave-tending is the only religion. Wash the headstone
like the face of a dirty child, firm but gentle. Deadhead
the bleeding hearts. Everything else is the gilded ballroom
of a grand hotel, live improvisational jazz playing
in the background, birds-of-paradise in tall red vases
on every table, checkout time drawing near.
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
She comes out of the dark seeking pie, but instead finds two dead peacocks.
One is strung up by its feet. The other lies on its side in a pool
of its own blood. The girl is burdened with curly bangs. A too-small cap.
She wanted pie, not these beautiful birds. Not a small, dusky apple
from a basket of dusky apples. Reach in. Choose a dusky apple.
She sleepwalked to this window, her body led by its hunger for pie.
Instead, this dead beauty, gratuitous. Scalloped green feathers. Gold breast.
Iridescent-eyed plumage, supine on the table. Two gaudy crowns.
She rests her elbows on the stone windowsill. Why not pluck a feather?
Why lean against the gold house of the rich and stare at the bird’s dead eye?
The girl must pull the heavy bird into the night and run off with it.
Build a fire on the riverbank. Tear away the beautiful feathers.
Suck scorched, tough, dark meat off of hollow bones. Look at her, ready to reach.
She’d hoped for pie. Meringue beaded gold. Art, useless as tits on a boar.
