Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
Page 4
He’s reading War and Peace again, but this time
from back to front, and so he refers to it, in his mind,
as Peace and War. We can tell by his wry smile.
He’s known for his wry smile.
The rest of us prefer what lies below what is called art,
the source of art, the raw field and not the story of the field,
and love, even when it’s guttural,
especially when it’s guttural and married to suffering,
which we trust.
We’re told to read the Bible but the Bible is another book,
and halfway through Genesis we feel as if we’re back in school,
stuffed into our desks watching some teacher
murmur on endlessly about things that happened
far away from here,
when all we want is to be home wearing our muddy field boots,
sitting on an upended bucket, shelling peas.
We wear our hairdos long and tumbled back like vine pours weighty
down a chain-link fence. We go, at times, unwashed to craft
that warm, green stink of algae-covered inland pond and grass-fed
cud. With the contents of one box and one can, we bake something
so sweet and gold you’ll want to marry the pan. In this way,
we are alchemical. If it’s pretty, we taxidermy our kill.
Here, a bear bigger than a travel trailer. There, an unnested baby
swallow small enough for the apex of a teacake. When asked
directions, we reference the red chickens, though they scatter. Turn
right at the red chickens or left, or if you see the red chickens you’ve
gone too far. We believe in the mortuary sciences and chip in
to charmingly lay out our dead in yellow silk as if they were rich
and cunning. At viewings, we talk about their mouths, how any moment
a word could come spilling out. Our decisions are poor, our work ethic
unfledged, our children are cockleburs in the far field, their branches,
terminal. In our midst, a woman who dances until her pudendum
is raw, which she announces from the top of the empty water tower.
Our memories are local, acute, and unrelenting.
Our hope is to quash them. Fields invite them,
and fog. So out of the brume that rises up
from snow in the spent vineyards comes a man
back from war, singing as he used to sing, such
large notes out of a small, skeptical mouth. Later,
his liver swells up like he is with child. And drifting
out of the burned field, that couple who lived
by the train tracks, their house smelling of pitch
from the wooden ties, and of mutt, from the lineup
of terriers they used in their trained dog act,
which they displayed in shabby, off-brand
traveling circuses throughout the Midwest. Once
even Texas. Harry and Jessie. Some of us never
laid eyes on them, and still we’re saddled with them.
Saddled, as if we’re the horse and memory the heavy
rider. We remember the hound whose smooth, warm
head we never stroked, whose relentless howling
was quashed by a can of pork and beans thrown
from an upstairs window, who keeled over dead
and was buried by the gravedigger, as a favor,
to pay a debt about which the less is said the better,
Dan, the hound, who resurrected the next morning,
used his fat paws and thick, black toenails to dig
his way out of his own grave, whose sad bay persisted
for years, long past his actual death, and still persists.
It has become a burdensome song we hum
sometimes while nursing the sick or doing dishes.
The Hand Has Dropped the Fruit and It’s Painted Where It Falls
or such is the theater of painting for every painting is a performance some complete with curtains pulled away for the spectator to see the fruit as if casually dropped and painted where it falls or the hare strung up or the turkey hanged from one gnarly foot as if the painter had no design on reality but only painted it haphazardly an improvisation of objects in space but actually a performance of haphazardness as if to say art is not artifice it meets you where you shrug off your robe or pile your strawberries in a basket with no eye for composition but even the haphazard is arranged by the eye was it Rimbaud who said a derangement of arrangements
thus Williams’s so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens is anything but an accidental tableau viewed for instance through a window as he tended a dying woman in her bed one hears the rhymes of glazed and rain and barrow of wheel and water and white of depends and chickens and considers how briefly water glazes a surface before it must evaporate and leave us behind and how quickly chickens flap their filthy wings and scatter how wheel is separated from barrow rain from water white from chickens so that all constituent parts of what appear to be simple solid randomly arranged objects have been factored down to their prime numbers how nothing is casual nothing is uncomposed whether a curtain is drawn away from the deathbedroom window or not
I Look Up from My Book and Out at the World through Reading Glasses
The world, italicized.
Douglas fir blurs into archetype,
a black vertical with smeared green arms.
The load of pinecones at the top,
a brown smudge which could be anything: a wreath
of moths, a rabbit strung up
like a flag.
All trees are trees.
Death to modifiers.
A smear of blue, a smear of gold that could be a haystack,
a Cadillac, or a Medal of Honor without a neck to hang upon.
I know the dog killed something today, but it’s lost in fog.
A small red splotch in a band of monochromatic green.
And now, the mountain of bones is only a mountain capped in snow.
It’s a paradise of vagaries.
No heartache.
Just an eraser smudge,
smoke-gray.
All forms, the man wrote, tend toward blur.
Silence Is So Accurate, Rothko Wrote
Accurate like an arrow without a target
and no target in mind.
Silence has its own roar, or not-roar,
just as Rothko wrote “I don’t express myself
in my paintings. I express my not-self.”
A poem that expresses the not-self.
Everything but the self.
The meadow’s veil of fog, but is veil self-referential?
Already, dawn, the not-birds alert to what silence has to offer.
The fog, one of Rothko’s shapes,
hanging there in the not-self, humming.
Mikel, before he died, loved Rothko most.
When he could still think, he put his mind
to those sorts of judgments.
If I pull the fog away like theater curtains, what then?
Sadness shapes the landscape.
The arrow of myself thwacks the nearest tree.
Fog steps closer like a perpetrator or a god.
Oh. I’m weeping.
Tears feed the silence like a mother drops
into her baby not-bird’s open beak
some sweet but dangerous morsel.
It Seems at Times That Silence
has a roundness like an apple,
and that even an apple is made
of planes, minute horizontals
and verticals, ruby and russet
and freckled and spackled
and black. And that silence
is really not bereft of sound,
it’s only that a heavy stratum
of noise has been lifted up
&n
bsp; to expose the resonances
below: eccentric cries of birds
which might be called lonely,
and the workaday discourse
of insects, and the whistling
of something rising up
or falling from the air.
If this layer could be lifted
like a cool, flat rock at the base
of a fir tree baring the writhers
beneath, and the layer of minuscule
sound below, and the layer below
that, the final silence might be
found, the last one, turning
round on its stem like an apple.
Still Life with Dictator
Anyone can look at a bowl filled with plums.
Even the ones trampled beneath the hooves
of the general’s white horse—the peons,
the threshers, the nobodies. Food, the great
leveler. The nobodies must eat, even if
they resort to coffee grounds,
or sandwiches airlifted and dropped
into the jungle, teeming with maggots.
Food is food. Even the general must eat.
Even presidents, dictators. Hitler himself
would walk along the cliff’s edge from his
compound in Berchtesgaden to the round
teahouse in the trees. He’d settle himself
into the cushioned chair some nobody pulled
out for him, and into the nose, positioned
over that cowcatcher mustache, came
the scintillating fragrance of tea roses.
“There must be fresh flowers!” he’d barked
at the peons. As the steam from his tea
dampened his mustache, his eyes lit
on the white bowl aloofly holding
ten plums. He wanted to upend them, send
the white bowl spinning until it hit the curved
wall and broke into baby teeth.
“Who cares?” he wanted to say to the plums,
but they wouldn’t listen. Such an ordinary fruit;
he’d seen the nobodies wolfing them down
and spitting the pits in the air. Braying like donkeys,
like schoolboys. The plums mocked him
with their stillness. The sugar bowl mocked him,
the sugar spoon engraved with the fat head
of a thistle. Fruit sickened him, with its worms
and scars, its fermentation. Its plainness,
its roundness, its calm. It stared at him
like one of those nobodies who didn’t care
how many times it was whipped. One
of those who claimed to be beyond pain,
one with a glint of what the churches
would call holy light in their eyes. Plums,
taunting him until he grabbed one
and bit down and let the gold flesh
fill his mouth with its revolting sweetness.
The Heroic Penetrates the Quotidian
but the quotidian, like a cockroach,
has strength in numbers. The general
rears up on his steed, the angel
fills the canvas with her astonishing
illuminations, while the quotidian plods
on, dull-eyed, or doesn’t plod at all.
It’s a knife, a spoon, a wooden chair,
a pan, a log wrapped in blue flame.
The general has his sword and his story,
the angel her voluminous wings and her
song, but the quotidian’s only weapon
is stillness. Yet, everything caves to it.
Look at the general, he’s nothing
but bones in a moth-eaten uniform,
the angel, an adornment on his tombstone.
His story is snapped up by the tongue
of a frog. Her song is crushed
under a bowl of apples.
Silence Again
My mother had been sitting at his bedside for years.
Her exhaustion, epic. “Go home,” her friend ordered.
“I’ll sit with him. Sleep.” This was Jan, who lived
and died in her parents’ fieldstone house, and liked
to sleep with the windows open, even in winter,
to let the snow heap on her bed. He died while
my mother was absent. They do that, the dying,
waiting for someone to arrive or depart. Jan was
enough of a friend to sit there until the heart monitor
went flat, to shut down his eyes. She, too, died young,
a decade later, in a hospital bed in her parents’ house,
her head bald from chemo. I picture her down
on her knees in late spring, mudding-in the flowers.
That’s what she called it, mudding them in.
My father, after all the yelling when he was a boy,
the threats, the bottles of whiskey, the guns,
and the racket of war when he was on that ship,
the Nashville, finally got to open up his arms
to silence. Now, when I embrace it, silence,
especially at night, in the dark, I see my father’s
name, as if silence were a canvas he painted,
and his signature there in the corner.
Memento Mori
All my life, I’ve been writing of it but not from it, directing
a bare lightbulb at its profile so I may outline its silhouette
on tracing paper. Its gifts have been delivered to my door
in an unattributable basket, food nameless but nourishing,
the cook, anonymous, the recipe, untranscribed. I saw
my father carried from the couch into the waiting ambulance,
which wailed like my mother could not, like I did not,
as wailing is an art, its permissions, learned. The rotating
emergency light swept across his face like a rash, a red tide.
I was not there when he died. I was at school, learning
equations, trying not to pee my pants because peeing them
meant getting my wet bottom slapped by the teacher
and carrying the soaked underpants home in a paper bag.
Even if I’d been there, if I’d touched his face
with my fingers dirty from recess, I’d know nothing more
of it than I do now. He was so young, and death froze him
in time. If I knew him now I’d be his elder. I could tell him
to pick up after himself. To shut the door against the heat
or cold. His illness made me conscious of the veins beneath
the skin, the blue of a bruise and its gold aura, the bones that rise
through the skin when one has been sick for a long time, unable
to wear a suit and tie anymore, wrapped only in a blue robe
belted at the waist, and a back brace. He’d take short walks
up and down the sidewalk in front of our house, pacing,
my mother called it, a word I contemplated, as I did the word
“throb,” until they became part of my consciousness, just as I imagine
he contemplated the thing inside him, the thing he was inside,
or soon to be, like a man walking the gangplank contemplates
the sublime blackness of the sea. Once, I ran from the school bus
and leaped into his arms as he paced, like a girl in a movie. Knocked
his chin with my skull, made him bite his tongue. He stuck it out
to show me the blood my performance had cost him. Blood type
O negative, which later I’d seek in other men, his disease,
histiocytosis X, which together made tic-tac-toe. We played it
sometimes in the hospital room, but our hearts weren’t in it.
Is anyone’s heart in tic-tac-toe? It’s a game built for hospital rooms.
His abdomen was interestingly swollen. His hands strangely cold.
My fac
e oddly ugly as I cried looking into a hand mirror.
My consciousness growing adverbs, distended with them.
The transformation was incremental; he’d been sick
my whole life, six years, then seven, so what I knew of Father
was a body in constant progression, though toward what end
I could not imagine. The closest I can come to empathy for that
destination is when I was put under for surgery. Ten, nine, eight,
gone. No comfort, no embrace, only absent, an empty desk at school,
an empty coat hook, a locker resonant with its own hollowness.
On the day he died, I walked alone up Fulkerson Rd. to my
Brownies meeting, pressed my forehead to the screen door before
opening it and heard the girls inside praying for me. Absent
but present. Present to my absence. Is this death? For a while, I thought
it belonged only to my father and family pets. It was months before
I understood my mother too would someday die, any time she left
the house she could die, like when she went on a three-day bender
with her brother and was spotted all over town, flipping burgers
at the Four Square, laughing or crying and dancing at the cemetery,
and I lay awake at my grandmother’s house, in the bat-filled dark,
waiting for word of my mother’s demise, drunk and hit by a train
at the unmarked railroad crossing by the underground house.
Even at home, watching Shock Theater on TV, pounding meat
with a mallet, reading a book, the one titled How to Raise Children
at Home in Your Spare Time, death could take her. Only later, after
shooting a rabbit in mid-leap, I saw that I could kill and I, too, would die,