Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

by Diane Seuss

  The Knight’s Dream

  You dream, like we do, of cash. Cash and clocks and beads. Like us, of masks. Skulls

  and masks and treasure and guns. You dream of the curved world. Of ruling it.

  Like us, do you wake to an unruly field? Do you stroke, from inside

  your trailer, the thoraxes of june bugs pressed against the window screen?

  Do you do with your old sadness what the thunderhead does with its rain?

  Knight, there’s plenty to be sad about. What if you’re not really a knight?

  What if you’re only a knight in your dream? You wake to no glittering

  waistcoat and breeches, no black velvet hat, just a shirt and ill-fitting

  pants, tight in the crotch or loose in the crotch, from the church donation room.

  Nothing to defend but a couple of acres of blighted field corn.

  No one feels sorry for you. Too much like feeling sorry for ourselves.

  Not even that angel you dreamed up, a long-haired boy with barn owl

  wings whose missive is, he hallucinated you. You are his fever

  dream. The clock’s dream, coin’s dream. The skull gnaws on the bad idea of you.

  Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber

  Anything can be a marionette. A quince, a cabbage, a melon, a cucumber,

  suspended against a black background, illumined by a curious

  white light. In this little show, the quince plays a full gold moon. The cabbage

  is the antagonist, curled outer leaves fingering the charcoal void.

  Cucumber’s the peasant, nubby belly to the ground like a frog.

  That leaves melon, center stage, rough wedge hacked out of her buttery side.

  Each object holds its space, drawing the eye from quince to cabbage, melon

  to cucumber, in a left to right, downward-sloping curve. Four bodies

  hang in the box of darkness like planets, each in its private orbit.

  It’s a quiet drama about nothing at all. No touch, no brushing

  up against each other, no oxygen, no rot, so that each shape, each

  character, is pure, clean in its loyalty to its own fierce standard.

  Even the wounded melon exudes serenity. Somewhere, juice runs

  down a hairy chin, but that is well beyond the border of the box.

  The Last Still Life: The Head of Medusa

  There are stories we refuse to tell. To tell them would be to set them

  loose upon the world. Like the girl (not innocent, no one’s innocent)

  whose body was swooped down upon by a larger, meaner, murkier

  story like an enormous granite pestle that crushed her own winsome,

  soft, unconscious, run-of-the-mill story into something like cornmeal

  mush. Then once upon a time (there is no once, there is no time) the girl

  was winnowed down like a bar of soap. She cut off her hair and refused

  to wash it. Beauty’s so dumb, she was known to say, isn’t beauty dumb?

  She moved into a rusted-out potato-chip delivery van

  between the gasoline storage tanks and the river. She kept a clump

  of snakes in a green steamer trunk. Black ones. Gold, with patterns. Real writhers.

  Once she became a full-fledged woman, things around town started turning

  to stone. The dam dried up. Fields, banks, and meadows. No rain. Then, overnight,

  the burial ground became a parking lot. All was stillness. The End.

  Walmart Parking Lot

  Jackson Pollock

  Frozen Coke splatter, and the disembodied sadness of the one who accidentally dropped it. Vomit-arc. Winding loops of coal tar sealant. Sparrows, too, have left their mark. From above, a seagull has mistaken it for a large body of water and glides on air currents, screeching intermittently, looking down, as if on holiday. The rectangle has no interest in telling you a story. Its debauched energies hum like telephone wires after the last caller has been taken off of oxygen.

  Mark Rothko

  Some of us would take the South Shore to Chicago to see art. We’d stand in front of large canvases in palatial museums, speaking to each other in invented languages. We wore solid yellow shirts and red pants, with a rope belt demarcating the blocks of color, befuddling the critics. The art, we saw, was good. We swallowed it down hungrily, without filter, like drinking water straight from the creek, no matter the risk, because it tasted so sweet. We rode the swaying train home at sunset, the smokestacks of Gary shooting flames into a sky already clanging orange. The city had been a dream. Home, too, a dream, black above, silver-gray below, floodlit by buzzing security lights.

  Georgia O’Keeffe

  From above, we’d like to believe, it’s made of the same bone that we are. How high would we have to go to see it as the skull of the deer we found summers ago in the creek bed? Deep down, we know it was not born and cannot die. Or it is death, the everlasting kind, not like a field, not at all like a field, which lives even as it dies, and dies as it lives. Also unlike the field, there was a time before this was here. It moved in, but we don’t remember when, like a stepmother who came so long ago she’s erased all memory of our mother.

  Andy Warhol

  To enter the store is to be seen wanting. We have deposited our checks. Now we buy the CD of the girl who sounds like a naughty baby. Now we buy the skirt, the top that shows our belly, and the Dexatrim that will shrink it so it can be shown. We buy a self-frosting kit for the spikes of our hair and the gloss that frosts our lips with cold dew. We are saving up for a barbwire tattoo. The nose piercing went wrong. We hemorrhaged for days, had to remove the stud and let it heal over, leaving behind a weird scar. Don’t show us as we are, walking to the car in the heat that radiates up from the cement they laid over the burial ground. Show us only when we’re ready, and when we’re ready, show us large, but to get ready will take us years.

  Alice Neel

  Like you, our nostrils are asymmetrical. Like you, our ankles swell. Our children, in their specificity, look like monsters. You must confront our terrible nakedness, our nipples swollen and dark, our bellies marked with the dusky purple latitudinal line of pregnancy. Our pubic bushes are thick and red, or black and spare, or we are old and left alone with a gray thatch. If we are children, we’re bare and unashamed, our hands on our hips, until we are shamed. Like you, we enter the store. Like you, we exit. The light outside will not relent.

  American Still Lifes (the Gothic Sublime in 102 Syllables)

  Still life with stack of bills phone cord cig butt and freezer-burned Dreamsicle

  Still life with Easter Bunny twenty caged minks and rusty meat grinder

  Still life with whiskey wooden leg two potpies and a dead parakeet

  Still life with pork rinds pickled peppers and the Book of Revelation

  Still life with feeding tube oxygen half-eaten raspberry Zinger

  Still life with convenience store pecking order shotgun blast to the face

  Sentences

  Sis moved back and forth from Cheetos to M&M’s.

  Lil talked a blue streak, sucking from her baby bottle between sentences.

  Little Ro showed up without pants or a diaper.

  What’s that dick smell, Sis asked.

  That’s when the goat showed up.

  The Jesus camp kids walked back to their own yard, single file.

  Hold your horses, Lou said that night to her dead sister, wait up, I’m on my way.

  She used her last trip out of the house to make her own arrangements.

  When she opened her purse to get out the cash to pay them, it smelled like a purse.

  I want my own pillow in there, and the blanket with the bees on it.

  Let me wear this hat, she said, trying it on so they’d remember.

  She looked at them hard through the veil.

  Betty got to where she couldn’t live in a house anymore.

  She took a Singer dress form off its tripod, cu
t it open and used it as a suitcase.

  She had a carrot peeler in there, bar of soap wrapped in wax paper.

  Buffalo head nickels and some bones, but she never said whose bones.

  She wore a round, hollow one on her finger like a wedding ring.

  She toted that thing around town like a kid too old to be carried.

  May was just a skeleton with a few blue-white hairs stuck to the skull.

  She’d been like that for days, on the couch with the TV blaring.

  The whites of her eyes were the color of egg yolks.

  May wouldn’t blink, afraid her eyes wouldn’t open again once she shut them.

  Her lungs fluttered like two pink pillowcases on a clothesline in a stiff breeze.

  She had one of those smiles on her face like she was getting away with something.

  Chris said, tell me you’re not fighting over a McNugget, you two.

  Little Ro’s big ears made him look dumb, but he wasn’t dumb.

  He took out his measuring tape and measured a french fry.

  Chris had given up on lipstick but she still used the blush with gold sparkles.

  No ball pit until you finish your Hi-C, she said to all three of them.

  Little Ro peed his big-boy pants while measuring the cash machine.

  They all got pink eye and then strep and then double ear infections.

  You’re all going to need tubes in your ears, the doctor said.

  Chris laid in a supply of popsicles.

  Brian was doing ok until he shot his gun in the air for fun and broke his eardrum.

  The rooster went after Sis, so Brian put it in a sack and hit it a few times against a fieldstone.

  Three sick kids and a sick man and her own ears so plugged up she couldn’t hear the baby.

  They took away Jim’s gun, but if he decided not to put up with it anymore he’d find a way.

  He sat there smoking weed and washing down pain pills with a 40 of Olde English.

  Try to imagine what it’s like without legs, he said.

  Back in the day, his wife said, how many times you going to say back in the day?

  If I could walk, I’d pop her one, he said, and blew out a long stream of smoke.

  I’ll tell you what, Jim said, back in the day, I would have been dead a long time ago.

  Hindenburg

  And I’m like he’s got a tumor the size of the Hindenburg and she’s like in his belly and I’m like no not in his belly hell the belly would be a blessing the belly would be all John 3:16 and then I’m like no it’s in his neck it’s in his goddamned neck and I blame the government and she’s like who do you blame and I’m all I blame the government and she’s like if I were you I’d blame the bug spray you remember how when we was all kids how the little yellow airplane would bug spray the soybean fields and I’m like oh you better believe I remember but with him the bug spray was small potatoes compared to Nam and she’s like compared to what and I’m like compared to Nam to Vietnam and she’s like oh Vietnam he was over there for how long and I’m like long enough I’m all long enough to end up with a tumor on his neck the size of the Hindenburg and she’s like the size of what and I’m like the Hindenburg and she’s like what’s the Hindenburg and I’m all it was a balloon a balloon that caught fire in the sky and she’s like a balloon on fire and I’m all a balloon on fire and she’s like a balloon doesn’t seem that big and I’m like that one was

  There’s Some I Just Won’t Let Die

  I don’t care how many times they reach out to their dead sister reach away I say you’re not dying even if all that’s left of them is a skull with one long silver hair sticking out of it some even all the way dead and I’m like a schoolmarm pulling a kid back into the classroom by the hem of her dress when she climbs out the window to run home to mama it’s like I’m saying you sit in that chair and learn your times tables little miss back then a teacher could slap a kid when they needed to be slapped hard enough to leave a handprint oh no you don’t I say and I hook my finger inside their mouth and pull out a clot like a blood plum the kind pops used to make into cordial but pops is gone and with him the recipe and the mystery of how he managed to get a bushel of blood plums in the middle of winter

  Bowl

  We work at the factory until it shuts down and then we work in the deli section or the meat counter. If a girl gets pregnant we throw her a baby shower with ice-cream cake if we’re all chipping in. No matter if it’s the second marriage or the third we hire a party bus and all us girls go out on the town, barbeque, bowling, and a Black Sabbath tribute band. If, in the photos, our faces look haggard or sad, it’s because you caught us at a bad moment. We are not haggard or sad. When the baby is born we’ll ringlet her hair. If it’s a boy we’ll cover him with socket wrenches and fire trucks. If the siren makes him scream we will distract him with a tit until he’s too old for tit and then we’ll distract him with a slice of ham and some American cheese. We do not want to be strange with one horn growing out of our foreheads. We want to be what the others have been, sit on the same stool the others have sat on when our ankles swell. All of our ankles swell. We are usual. We are like bowls. There have always been bowls. They’re shaped the way they are for a reason. Yes some have curlicues or paintings of angels but a bowl is a bowl and it has always been a bowl and it was here before you came and it will outlast you.

  American Run-On Sentences

  HOG MARKET

  bring your full-grown hogs to the white cinderblock free mermaid tails out front

  OVERSIZE LOAD

  you’d think they wouldn’t crowd the center line hauling carnival shit fools

  JESUS IS REAL CAMPGROUND

  got stocked fish pond free baptisms check out the view from calvary hill

  CORN MAZE

  we grew it screwy like to see people pay to get lost real crows too

  DEER PROCESSING

  the point of this business is to use every part testicles

  I Look at My Face in a Red Mylar Balloon Tied to a Mailbox

  Behind me the remains of the cinderblock tabernacle

  and behind me the west-leaning house with a red dirt floor

  and a stop sign on fire

  and a horse galloping past with red foam on its lips

  and Rhonda with the rusty birthmark on her neck who could lasso anything

  and Rick playing the blues in his red trailer with his waist-length hair

  and Ellie pregnant with his baby, her red belly button turned inside out

  my beet-colored hair blown over my eyes

  my mouth, bloody as if recently beaten

  and when the wind blows the balloon closer, all I am is wounded mouth

  when I open it, I can swallow the town

  Stateline Pastoral

  Our hair is large. It contains multitudes

  of pins and nits and bows. Our bodies are wrong but coherent.

  Love is our mission,

  the wedding, our modus operandi, our peep show and opera.

  Once it’s over, our beauty’s spent.

  The fiancée is not so much human as integer.

  If the wedding’s in winter, with fur

  sewed to the cuffs of all formalwear,

  by spring the corset bones are exposed.

  June’s the unlucky month.

  All the county’s porcupines are intent

  on puncturing the dream.

  When the freezer shuts down, we lose

  the side of beef, top of the cake, and the bouquet.

  For a minute there, everything looks

  freshly killed or baked or picked.

  We’re dizzied by the raw scent of tea roses.

  Autumn’s when the bruises show.

  Kicked by a horse, we’ve said for generations.

  Same horse, dumb, unsaddled, glass-eyed, white,

  with fire flaring from the nostrils.

  Weirdly, when our noses are broken and our houses

  foreclosed, that’s whe
n things get good.

  We die on our Harleys, driving too fast on unnamed roads.

  Our bodies fly backward, nostalgic

  for a past that never happened.

  Our souls stay with the bike, moving

  forward through cattails and daylilies.

  We’re leery of books, the way they colonize

  the imagination, and films, which infiltrate dreams,

  though at times we’ll flock to movies with explosions,

  for explosions clean out the carburetors of ourselves,

  unless we’re pregnant, for movie explosions

  have been known to cause miscarriages.

  Those of us haunted by war

  will sometimes turn to books to combat nightmares,

  choosing, from the shelves of the old library,

  the weightiest, the ones with a thousand pages,

  as if the object of the book, held close, could replace

  a dead comrade, and maybe it can, at least for the hours

  and days it takes to mouth each word like a newborn

  pig mouths the line of tits on its mother’s belly.

  There’s that man again, a former soldier,

  and once a soldier always a soldier, the one

  with the terrible limp who slurs his words

  into a new language, grotesque,

  though we nod and furrow our brows in understanding,

  for we do understand the intention beneath the words.