by Diane Seuss
that my father beckoned me like Ahab in Bradbury’s adaptation
of Moby-Dick for film, his body lashed to the whale by ropes,
his dead arm flagging back and forth with the heaving sea, mindlessly
beckoning, for the dead are beyond caring whether we follow them
into the brine or not. My father’s journey was one of disconnection
and reconnection. His mind carried him back to the ship he boarded
at seventeen, escorting MacArthur back to the Philippines.
In his delirium he shouted for the General, he was a sailor in his dying,
an archetype, not a family man. Have you traveled, in your wanderings,
to the Chapel of Bones in Portugal, the walls lined with human skulls,
femurs, fibulae, and teeth? Over the doorway: “We bones that here are,
for yours await” troubled me, its syntax unclear. Its arrangements
and sequencing. I tried to link one word to another, like struggling
to turn a bunch of reclusive birds, each the only one of its species,
into a flock. “We bones,” as if the bones are sentient beings,
like greeters at Walmart who are there to remind us that we, too,
will be greeters at Walmart, it’s only a matter of time. There with our
pole at the prow of the ferry. And here have I built, from these couplets
of metacarpals and metatarsals, a memento, a bone chapel
where the brave may pray and confess and baptize their children.
Self-Portrait with Herbarium
I bought premoistened bathing cloths for invalids
in order to avoid the shared bathroom and shower.
I did not want to eat with the others, so I lived on
saltine crackers I stored in a metal container to keep
away moisture, and wormy apples from the orchard.
I walked the grounds only after dark, and often
ducked beneath the low arbor to visit the graves
of the founders, to thank them for the trees
and meadows, the small gray squirrels and the toads
that leaped in front of me as I walked, and all the plants
that composed my herbarium. I took pleasure less
in the plants themselves than in their categorization.
I went to the library often, but only in the dead
of night. We each had a key, which revealed to me
a degree of trust that seemed, at best, naïve.
Some nights, but rarely, I came upon some other
woman out looking at the moon, which was gold
and swollen. I worried that it would break open
and spill its seed over the meadows.
To me, the animals, deer and foxes and such,
seemed terribly lonely. Even the pond shivered
in its loneliness, and the mountain, for there was
nothing in the landscape to which it could
compare itself. Owls called out to each other
but were only answered by cemeteries.
How did I return to the world? One night,
I walked beyond the stone gate, not through
any intention of escape, but only to seek a rare
flower I could press in the pages of a heavy
book and add to my collection. One quiet
foot in front of the other until I found
myself walking faster, as if pursued,
though no one was invested in calling me
back. Still, I felt like a freed prisoner.
The purple night lifted its heavy curtain
on a day like an unripe peach, orange and softly
green and curved. Mist lifted away
from the fields, revealing that what I’d thought
were boulders were actually cows, reddish,
lifting their white faces to look in my direction.
Self-Portrait with Emily Dickinson (Rebirth of Mourning)
— I lived on that granite edge
— Likened to lichen
— Rain streamed down the fascia
— One pink cypripedium
— Folded like cards or a vulva
— Trillium erectum
— How’s that for lonely?
— Crow was cawed out
— Trailed at her hem an unnoticed protégé
— White dress of fog
— Pooled in the lower curve of the D like tea in a spoon
— It was the dog that broke her
— Pitcher plant pressed in the herbarium
— If Ginsberg levitated in her attic, I’ll eat her Aeolian harp
— Upended a dash to make a headstone
— Weak urine stream
— Vanilla heliotrope lugged through buttercups
Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid
Some women make a pilgrimage to visit it
in the Indiana library charged to keep it safe.
I didn’t drive to it; I dreamed it, the thick braid
roped over my hands, heavier than lead.
My own hair was long for years.
Then I became obsessed with chopping it off,
and I did, clear up to my ears. If hair is beauty,
then I am no longer beautiful.
Sylvia was beautiful, wasn’t she?
And like all of us, didn’t she wield her beauty
like a weapon? And then she married
and laid it down, and when she was betrayed
and took it up again, it was a word-weapon,
a poem-sword. In the dream I fasten
her braid to my own hair, at my nape.
I walk outside with it, through the world
of men, swinging it behind me like a tail.
Self-Portrait under Janis’s Shoe When She Sang “Ball and Chain” at Monterey Pop, 1967
The sky was gold spangles, the wind a smoker’s cough and typhoon. Shade between her shoe-sole and the floor of the stage, a good place to tent-camp, our little fire and pan of Rice-A-Roni. An inch for my boy and me to live in. Like the dark between apples at the fruit stand. Like the inside of a muskellunge. Like what went on under the big belly of the water tower. Like the word “like” coupling the train cars of words so they don’t run off on their own down the track of the sentence. If Janis’s face was not pitted like the moon, then her face was only pitted, and there was no love to be had. “Like” links the iron ball to the leg iron and love to the whole contraption. Without “like,” there is only love or no love to be had. It’s like I found my boy in a pile of dirty laundry with a needle in his arm and his lips blue as cornflowers stuck in the middle of Texas. It’s like I grabbed his hand and pulled him out of death like a tent worm from its tent in a wild cherry tree. I did find him blue-lipped. I did grab him. Held him like a baby. I held him, my baby. Then Janis stamped her foot and lowered the boom.
Self-Portrait with Freddie M (Invention of Thunder)
I was Freddie Mercury’s body. I was the recording studio inside his mouth. His horse teeth were the teeth of my stallion. The show saddle that rubbed my thighs was tooled with scenes of Freddie’s early life in Zanzibar. He never fixed his teeth because he didn’t want to fuck up his voice. I never fixed my voice because I didn’t want to fuck up my teeth. The cow eye I dissected before I learned to be squeamish was his Adam’s apple. Freddie’s wardrobe was my uncle-by-marriage’s fly-by-night mink farm. Freddie’s waistcoat painted with pictures of his cats was a cage filled with condemned minks. His cats bred a stillborn black kitten who took up residence between my thighs. Freddie’s mustache was my smuggled buffalo. His mustache was my armpit shag. His high note was my low note. His high note set off tornado sirens and wedding bells. Freddie’s last thought knocked out my bowling alley. His last T cell apocalypsed my funeral parlor until the embalming table rattled off its runners.
Self-Portrait with Amy (Creation Myth)
That abortion I had in the late ’7
0s grew up to be Amy Winehouse. The music of Richard Hell and the Voidoids fertilized the hell out of my green pear and threatened to turn it into a watermelon. Margaret Sanger herself did the procedure, which involved a bicycle pump and tweezers. By the time “Back to Black” came out, the twin village idiots of my ovaries had already committed themselves to the Island of Misfit Toys from the Rudolph Valentino special we watched every year on the town silent TV on which Mr. Lee had pulled an Elvis the first time he laid eyes on The Rifleman. The town blamed all of Mr. Lee’s quirks on mustard gas. Yes, Amy was the spitting image of my aesthetic as expressed in my approach to eyeliner I’d invented in 1974 for my theatrical debut as Cleopatra as played by Theda Bara in the silent 1917 film starring Fritz Leiber Sr. as Caesar. All that’s left are fragments as the last print burned in a studio fire, so my high school revived it the same year Art Linkletter arrived to give us an anti-drug lecture and I got nicely stoned before giving him a tour of the school’s dank hallways and therefore led him down to the creek where he got stung by something due to the insect’s attraction to his red sports jacket. I love you, I said to Amy Winehouse the first time I saw the black beehive she’d cooked up for herself. I wrote her a note on a cocktail napkin describing the intersections that led to her conception. That night, I’d kissed the wall over the urinal at CBGB, pee dribbling down my thighs as I’d found my way to the wrong powder room. The moon was starving itself again. Blondie’s lips, whether through fate or accident, met mine. A Voidoid spit in my eye. Mikel called sobbing from San Francisco. He’d found a Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion on his thigh. This is what made you, Amy. Nothing could kill you, though I tried.
Self-Portrait as Mouthpiece of an Anonymous Benefactor
Flocks of sparrows are waiting to be articulated.
Like Bob Dylan after a concert in the middle
of the night in a strange city, mount your mare
of a motorcycle and ride her into the outer
township, or be Emily, who broke her seclusion
to walk the moonlit fields, only after midnight,
as she was a jazz musician, and only with her
Newfoundland, Carlo. At some point, you must
unpackage your pen. Your hair like an unpeopled
spring-fed pond full of small leeches. Your eyes
like snails on the riverbank where colonial madmen
sailed. At some point, be Arturo at the piano,
land hard on a note like Frank and listen to its echo.
Don’t think about things with any degree of largesse.
Be the rock in the pocket that helps the weary poet
sink. There are fawns in the fields: triplets and twins.
Some without lice, without meningitis. I’m giving you
hope like a weird dessert whether you want it or not.
Do you want it? Or not? By the way, the chickens
need to be locked in their box. The fox is hot to trot.
The moon’s on a suicide watch. Her swelling
makes her nervous. No, she’s not bulimic. It’s genetic.
Explore the long sentence. I mean the long prison
sentence. Unmask syntax. So many ways to be a petty
linguist. Government cheese is an aesthetic. Gratitude
for free food is an aesthetic. If you start to smell
like a fish, you’ve gone too far. The best artists are gutted,
their innards thrown to hungry dogs in a story
by Chekhov. In Chekhov, all the dogs are hungry.
The hairdos are outrageous. There is no such
thing as a personal lubricant. There is spit.
There is something like cement made of tiny
shells and off-brand pearls, flora but no fauna.
I’m not drunk. Are you drunk? This is elementary
and I’m the custodian. I’m who swats the fly
that buzzes when you die. That guy.
Two Floor Mosaics
I – The Unswept Room
“[Sosos] laid at Pergamon what is called the asarotos oikos or ‘unswept room,’ because on the pavement was represented the debris of a meal, and those things which are normally swept away, as if they had been left there, made of small tessera of many colours.”—Pliny, Natural History
And so here they are, underfoot: nutshells,
stems, pods, a shallot, bones, empty snail shells,
a crooked bird’s foot and its shadow.
The mosaicist has even added a mouse,
something alive among the hulls and bones,
sucked clean. Potential energy there.
I imagine a crazy line it might draw if its tail
were dipped in ink, connecting the debris
into something like a constellation, a story.
I imagine also the woman enslaved
to the broom, the one who must
clean up after the rough partiers.
“Crazy folk,” I hear her mumble
in her language, sweeping up the real
bones from the ones they call art.
II – Roman Floor Mosaic with the Head of Medusa
“There is a sense of the floor growing transparent and revealing behind it a spatial plunge, like a well … and in the moment when the pattern ‘reverses’ all sense of ground is taken away: the entire surface seems to open down into a void.”—Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting
I use a magnifying glass to see
the image clearly. Yes, the optical
illusion draws me in, but at its bull’s-eye
is not a void, but the head of Medusa.
She’s looking less terrifying than worried.
The snakes in her hair are doing their
writhing—I almost wrote writing.
Her eyebrows are dark and sinuous
as well, rhyming visually with the snakes.
The look on her face is that of a woman
in a predicament: How did I end up
at the vortex of the void? In the depths
of the well of groundlessness
is my face, like the ovary of a flower—
but turned to stone.
Passover Lamb
Within the painting’s real frame
is a secondary, painted frame composed
of flowers—roses, white lilies, salmon-tinted poppies,
and the blossoms of fruit trees. Inside the floral
frame, she’s painted another frame,
this one nearly black, and elliptical, with an angelic head,
as if carved there, and wings, painted at the top. Two clusters
of grapes, one purple, one green, flank the head,
seeming to balance the illusory frame, the grapes so ripe
they appear ready to drop from their stems. Within the false frame’s
false window, we see the Passover lamb, prepared for slaughter.
It’s painted prone on a black, petal-strewn board,
the legs tied together at the middle joint
so that the pointed hooves fan out from their binding
like the sepal at the base of a bloom. The lamb’s curls
are perfectly rendered, as are its flanks,
and soft, folded ear and large, dark eye, cast down.
It fought hard, but the fight is over.
The pink nose rests on the black plane of the board.
I imagine small, huffing breaths, breath that smells sweet
like the breath of an infant. (I remember those days,
when my child’s breath was sweet.) All that’s left to be finished
is a blade to the throat, a small struggle, a cry,
and then all of those flowers washed in blood.
The painter stages the scene with layers of artifice.
My eye journeys through the floral, the divine, the decorative,
as through theater curtains, until I land upon the lamb
just before—just before the death of tender
ness.
What Could Be More Beautiful Than Fede Galizia’s Cherries?
On the left, five cherries joined at the stem-end and their nest of nearly black leaves. A small gold butterfly rests its thorax against a leaf. On the right, three pears united, again, at the stem-end. The stems are melded to a bit of the branch of the pear tree that made them. There are dark leaves, for balance with the right, and a single cherry dangles from the elevated tray for equilibrium with the gold butterfly. The profusion of cherries on the silver dish are cherries as we dream of them. Each perfectly spherical, nothing smashed or distorted, no worms or scars, just perfect cherries lit as if each held a small red room, and a girl, and a candle bringing gold up through the red walls. They’re sour cherries. Bright red with something yellow in their nature. A tartness that hurts the glands. Did she shine them, wax them? Each is branded by light. And the gold stems waterfall down. She loves them, the chance they give her to paint lines as well as spheres. The stem of the elevated tray is a prototype for “stem.” It’s engraved with something like valances, curtains behind which Fede, never married, it is written, lies on a small bed in Milan, dying of the plague.
Woman Looking at a Table
Through the grid of the glass windowpanes,
the woman looks in at a table filled with the debris
of a meal. A glass of wine, unfinished. Bread
torn to pieces as if fought over. A cheese in its rind,
a heavy cloud of butter on a plate, half a pear,
and a black-skinned ham, mostly intact,
but enough sliced away to expose the white layer of fat
and the bone, a strange, phallic-looking thing
visually linked to the blade of the knife, which points to it
like an arrow. The woman looks in, hungry-eyed,
