The Sleeve Waves
Page 3
—VIRGIL, Ecologues, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough
Pastoral
We’re sheep. We knit
unitards no thief can lift.
We’re exacting, but effortless.
We got a gig!
—playing ourselves
in an amphitheater so vast
our fans disappear in the grass.
Are they human?
Are they Gods?
We don’t give a rat’s ass.
We’re sheep: our job
is to stabilize the field.
We’re purely instrumental.
We don’t speak. Why bother?
In summer it’s summer forever.
III
If light and gravity are waves, then what is waving?
—XIAO-GANG WEN, “Microscopic Origin of Gravity and Light”
Thrifting
Goodwill smells of sweat and whiskey. Still the tightwad
palms her penny. Nothing can escape
her grip. She does not wish
to be rich, only safe,
which is a way of backing slowly
into an unbuttoned cardigan sweater,
like Mr. Rogers (R.I.P.),
whose words were parsimonious,
as if he had no rage, no urge, no penis.
Yet Fred was as masculine—in his way—
as Abe, whose head the shopper holds
hard in her hand
until it marks her skin: a red ring with no tail,
its beginnings fused to its ends,
impossible to keep,
impossible to spend.
The cost of the loafers is unclear black
marker scrawled on black leather.
O Fred, your name means peace in the tongues of the ancestors—
so why these needs, these expenditures?
Peace suspended, peace-in-amber—
won’t you be my neighbor?
Paradise, Wisconsin
Mary Nohl’s house
is hemmed in by flora
and fauna she fashioned
from hand-mixed cement.
For years she practiced
the art of continuous error,
wrong turns taken
so meticulously
they began to form peonies,
horses, and trolls,
all cracked and lumpy.
Now the vandal’s task
is obscure: to ruin ruins,
to spray-paint stones
that take gang tags
so easily even such small
crimes feel impossible,
like flying. And yes,
the cranes come too,
down from Baraboo
to shit all over.
When they spread
their white wings they fail
to resemble angels—
they’re too saurian, too clumsy,
but as they rise
in the summer dark
they knock loose
the abstract idea of heaven,
and leave it behind,
like a thug’s tooth,
in Mary’s concrete garden.
A Is for Air
i.
Dismantle the desks.
Melt the monkey bars.
Rip the clock off the wall.
Augment the drinking fountain with fake
marble cupids and replace
childhood with something easier,
say, lilacs afloat in their own scent,
and then,
then I can go back to Fernwood School
with my daughter and explain
that school is impossible
but worth the pain
because you learn an alphabet that settles
into marvels, into fearless Jane
Eyre, whose childhood was miserable,
and whose face was plain.
ii.
Except my daughter is beautiful,
and she hates long novels,
and she’s adopted from a country
with so many intimate Gods
that when I watch her I wonder
whose supernatural hands
are guiding her—
but of course it’s just me,
bringing her a lilac
in a coke-bottle vase,
which she accepts,
because she wants to be polite,
as she steps gracefully over her p’s and q’s
into her lace-up flying leather
miraculous
cheerleading shoes.
Duck/Rabbit
What can be shown, cannot be said.
—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
It’s a law:
even the same socks
aren’t the same,
post-wash.
I cover the bed with singles,
some familiar, some strange.
Green stripes, peace signs,
and of course whites,
that are, like white people,
not really white,
which was Wittgenstein’s point:
nothing matches.
Notes from a Northern State
We moved for jobs
to the land of dead
deer strapped to cars.
Deer country sure
ain’t horse country—
no one rides anyone’s back.
It’s all fleeting sightings:
a flash of fur, a horn, a single
eye among the branches.
Tiny ice-fishing houses
dot the lakes, and in each house,
a man, a thermos,
and a phone with no reception.
Can’t call the men.
Can’t ask them how to gut
fish, or smoke venison.
Our mantle’s antler rack
is ironic, from an L.A. thrift
store, hung with bits
of broken chandelier,
but it’s grown grave
in Wisconsin, a state
that’s neither boot-
nor mitten-shaped,
but larger and harder
to place: rivers pour
themselves into stillness.
Jesus preached “have faith”
at Galilee, but here every lake
is walkable in winter.
O Lord, we will always be strangers.
A Walk across the Ice
During the sea blizzards
she had her
own portrait painted.
—ANN SEXTON, “The Double Image”
Winter’s what we’re walking into. Our veins
map blue highways,
routes first traced
by William Least Heat Moon
in a travelogue my mother read me
years ago, before I could read myself,
before I wondered if Persephone
blamed her mother
for dragging her home by the braids.
Controlling bitch. But
winter’s what we’re walking into.
If I put my arm in her arm,
will it sink too far
into the interior,
like a bone spur,
or a stent?
It’s late. The light is brief.
If her boots leak, mine fit her,
and so we walk into winter.
Our shared DNA
makes us too unstable for skates,
but there is a gliding,
a set of parallel tracks,
an ease,
because we did not take the cocker
spaniel with her large
infected ears—
because our postmenopausal bones
are light and porous—
and because the lake ice
is thick enough for a Zamboni,
so I can’t fall through,
and she can’t rescue me.
The Thorne Rooms
Art Institute of Chicago
We
move like clumsy
poltergeists—too wide for the doors,
too big for the chairs.
We can only stare
as the rooms progress
through ages of teensy
domestic fashions:
Tudor, Victorian, Modern.
O for a beaker fit for a finch!
O for a pocket-divan!
How we burn to enter
the one-twelfth-scale kitchen.
There must be a way to smuggle food in—
a snip of chive or a blueberry—
but no. Maybe when we’re very old,
we’ll lose the urge to stuff ourselves
into the miniature
Art Deco parlor
with its lamp stamped Tiffany,
or maybe desire’s
what makes old ladies so skinny.
They wonder, Are we wiry
enough to slip in? Are we ready?
They know the key
to power is not bulk
but compression,
which is why grown women
love dollhouses.
Just Looking
for C.F.R.
Love is solid but also narrative,
so no matter how far the frame expands—
the frame with its gilt edges,
its fleur-de-lis, its stylized squirrels—
there’s always an outside
that ought to be in:
junk DNA, random ancestors,
spoons, spackle, syllables,
so when I say I love you I mean
I love the parts I want to see,
which is why the frame
is integral to the picture,
even in the calmest Vermeer,
Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.
She’s been pregnant since 1664,
but she’s content to wait,
which is how it feels to stand still
in the pool of your natural light,
filling an hour with exactly that hour,
the way humans fill skin in pictures.
Blush
Eighth grade. Sex.
How it made us
antsy. Dizzy.
How it forced us
into ourselves,
all slick and sticky—
quivers shooting
through dirt, down
roots, up stems.
Sex. How it pressed
us into flowering.
So embarrassing—
but embarrassing
like the preacher on the bus.
Armpit stains. Buzz cut.
He starts reading
Genesis aloud:
in the beginning—
Everyone snickers,
but soon falls silent,
because yes,
it happened to us.
The darkness. The sword-bearing angel.
The garden. The flood.
Thirst
Milwaukee Public Museum, 2010
Part Bible, part bullshit—
but which is which?
That’s the Dead Sea
Scrolls in a nut-
shell: none can tell
the aleph from the rip,
God from a census list.
Airlessly the population drifts,
a thousand years dead,
still stuck in bits
and pieces to the clay.
In lieu of God’s right hand,
ossuaries hold knuckle-
bones turned to sand.
Prophets? They’re easy to picture.
What’s tougher is lovers:
how flexible they were—
touching in tents,
their flesh mostly water,
leaving no trace,
except in the fountain
between two doors marked
men and women.
Drink,
and the gnostic text begins
its exegesis: how the sea
is the scroll’s twin,
but deeper. Press
a lever and upwell
the same identical molecules
the spirit hovered over,
in darkness,
in the beginning,
and here is the miracle:
we can drink them,
again and again.
We can be purified.
We can be sated.
Watson and the Shark
Baronet Watson’s emblem
depicted his lost foot,
which was eaten by a shark
off the coast of Cuba in 1849.
When he fell into the ocean,
Watson was fourteen,
an orphan,
not yet a baronet, not yet the ex-
Lord Mayor of London.
In Copley’s oil,
Watson and the Shark,
the boy Watson’s long hair
streams like elegant
seaweed. He’s nude. The shark
wants to consume
his luminous flesh,
but so does every viewer.
Together we hold Watson half-
underwater. He looks more like a girl
than a predator. The paint
suspends Watson
in pigment that makes us believe
there’s a new world floating
behind the painting,
alive with edible leaves.
The Schoolteachers
When we visit the Gardner Museum
we never see Rembrandt’s
Storm on the Sea of Galilee.
It’s burgled. Only thieves
know where it rages—
so we repair to Whistler’s Wand,
the Degas, and the Florentine credenza.
We can locate the Sea,
the earth’s lowest,
in McKnight’s Geography,
but Rembrandt’s weather is out
of Doppler-radar reach,
gone like the students
we can’t begin to teach.
They use prison shivs
to tattoo H-O-M-E-S-I-C-K
on their skin. They mix
ballpoint pen ink
with ash, and rub it in.
They think we’re shocked.
They think we’re “sivilized.”
But we’ve stared down the blank
space on the wall:
no boat, no disciples, no Christ,
and when we die we’ll come back
from Bardo as birds.
We’ll light on the Gardner’s roof
with our wings still warm,
and we’ll offer ourselves
as interpreters of the storm.
Ink
Samuel Steward, d. 1993
The tattoo artist’s
testicular tumor
came from a teratoma,
a malabsorbed embryonic twin.
The doctor said what mattered
was a cure.
The tattooist demurred:
what mattered to him
was the little sib lodged
in his right testis,
expanding benignly
at first, then deadly.
The teratoma took it slow.
Always the muffled music.
Always the black ink bath.
Always the guest in the guestroom
repeating
its fragments of DNA.
The tattooist covered
his calves with roses.
He wanted to send a single
stem to his twin,
but it couldn’t be delivered
past the blood-brain barrier,
past the wall in the heart
that holds the possible
and the impossible
in adjoining cells,
but apart.
Doppelzüngig
In medieval allegories,
Death’s like us, but smarter.
He covers his face
to
block his rank
odor. Last night
a raccoon-corpse
flooded the yard.
No visible body,
just a scent so fishy
it plunged us
into a pre-human
anoxic ocean. We fought
to breathe.
Why didn’t we go indoors?
Why did we sit
in deck chairs
letting it come—
this wave we couldn’t begin
to grasp
with our tiny
opposable thumbs?
Fall Forward, Spring Back
Since I hate friendly
dogs they love me,
or maybe it’s sincerity
that spooks me—I sniff
their eager scent
and get a hit so strong
it makes me dizzy.
Fall is complex:
part ochre, part setter.
The dog on the corner
isn’t pure fur; his flesh
heats up as he barks.
I rush past to skirt
his to-do list.
Still, he insists:
throw a stick, throw a stick,
as if I were not person but park,
a maze designed by Frederick Law Olmsted,
groves, curves, vistas,