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Excerpt
COMINGS AND GOINGS
Bangkok
Once, in a house I will inherit in a land I can't explain,
I heard the shout
of meat bones offered up from the market where it all goes
wholesale. Actually, the morning's
heat rose from the newly paved road--thin folds debuting
into the visible--
and much later, children were called in, one by one,
away from, because of,
the street. All day, from somewhere beyond the billboard
of a woman amply
luring tourists to new tastes, came the sound of temple monks
praying for their one wish--
born wanting to be born again. I'd been told their voices'
tidal heave and dwindle
would pay the debt, in part, to whatever local god they used
to conjure creation,
giving it their good deeds, right notes, in- and exhalings,
short spans of the body.
Meanwhile, this week in this world, a mound of sludge and leaf rot
caught behind the house is,
over a week's time, veiled and parceled out among
the red ants. And still
the black flies keep entering and exiting the air above
the table's day-old
bowl of plums. I'd like to know how it's good, or enough, for anyone--
this small rush into
the sickly sweet, these brief becomings, part of the increase
we call material...
Since there's also the ten-year-old girl I recognize and hardly know,
the one who's hired to sweep and clean,
to rid us of the dirt tracked in, and bundled out, finding the floor's
small shames. Dust clumps,
carpet threads, the bits of fallen meat scraps, all the S-shaped hair
that daily, secretly
escaped. What can she inherit in this country where they speak
three languages,
one for their betters, another for family, a last for servants:
millions of voices
pitched toward the accidents of birth? I know she could leave us
like some of the others
who wandered down the road for a better sum in the massage parlor
they also call a coffee shop.
Or could be dreaming already, as she sweeps, of the barker who calls
each of the girls
by number, so that, by turns, every one is among the chosen.
He's there, behind the strobe,
passing the bodies between one clark and the next, generation
after generation.
And she is here for now, mid-afternoon, her small hips' swing
a slow bargain with the heat.
As if this dust shaken from her broom could enter
the fragile argument,
we watch the freed traces scatter in sun, then cling briefly to grass.
We look up, then look away.
THE ANNUNCIATION
Starts with a stream of gold that's ridden
by a relentlessly linear dove,
ready to pierce a young girl's head.
Then, her face, her gaze looking up, out
past the easel and later, past the frame,
eyes raised as if to ask a question. Take
the virgin robe, for instance, which Van Eyck has made
to fall luxuriously as a second chance
across the old storyline etched below her.
And, further down, the church's intricately
strict apse, each floorboard, painstaked as lace, showing here,
David's lesson in beheading, there Samson's
tearing down the temple--that history
interrupted by her silken, layered folds:
each blue built up from perfecting the oil.
His favorite signature, "As best I can"
or "As I was able, but not just as I wished."
Think of the endless effort: a man
in the distance, deep in the could have been ,
who sat before the easel, hours, perhaps,
past his patience for lasting regrets,
flat refusals--the quick-drying water-based
attempts flung around a room.
And how, alone with pigment barrels, chamber pots,
the canvases stretched, the fire exhumed,
he poured a stream of oil back and forth,
watching it catch the light, change a wooden bowl.
For the sake of making the mundane
seem to marry the mysterious,
her eyes raised--lacquered, slippery wells, caught--
her startled acceptance. Since it's her choosing
to be chosen that mattered, largest figure
in the frame, the virgin form layered
with gold light, blue, her pale hands open
for the god imagined sick with thin horizon,
and ready to enter thickness now, the body's
blood, gristle, vertebrae, whorled fingerprint.
The oil spread back and forth. His wrist stiffened.
"As I was able, but not just as I wished."
So, out to pay the right kind of attention
to detail, as if, in the lengthening
carelessness of cracked roads leading away
from his town, beneath a matted pulp
of the year's leaves, he wished he could hear
silence taking shape: a weed, say, starting
to split the surface, part vegetal
altar and example of dumb, green change.
Or, say, through the window, a flock of geese
receding, advancing, by turns, as the sky's gray
sometimes meets the double-strength gray of sea,
he might have looked between the shapes,
their invisible lines blooded, some racing ahead,
others falling behind, each filling in, quickly,
empty spaces where the wings once beat.
And still, she looks up, asking to be entered.
So that if he turned away from shadows, wood panels,
chamber pots, winter coats lined against the wall,
he might have looked so far into the difficult
that he finally could believe: behind her gaze,
beneath her brow, under the layers of
shell, salt, finally skin-white, lay the mind
of a mother giving birth to a father
and a son, the flesh --a color, an instant, spared.
NEXT TO LAST PRAYER
1
Dear God, in shadows now and nothing but, come to think of it--
shape of a woman's dark
laid down against rocks,
her hair split by wind, then let to be whole, and back again.
As somehow it used to matter that in St. Louis a few
thunderheads could crowd
an oval plot of sky
toddler side of the apartment pool just before the others,
women and children, barefoot or flipflopped, riddled the turnstyle.
My mouth was/Mother's mouth.
The daily materials, innocent,
still in motion: offerings of Doublemint and spear-,
bags of sponge yellow bunnies, Fresca, warm, a brass-lime
aftertaste that faded.
So okay God,
either the bits come back, or swim up in pictures,
the seconds grabbed. My father, more than often then,
camera-ready, saying: look
up, Look out(snap).
I could hold myself right in the light so it finished
looking as though I'd held my breath. Something like swimming,
which he also taught,
mouthing: you hold your breath ,
seconds before I went under for the push and flail,
that slick privacy. And so from now on I'd like to know
what's to be made
of this life between
the mind's swing on memory's hinge (Father's
splashing at the deep end) and this shadow, wavering,
falling down over
and over again
(dear Mother) against dirt, concrete, shade of the body
that won't stay put--I know the point we never mentioned
was home, dark spot
on a kitchen curtain
where someone threw the bowl of hot soup, spot where the shouts
seemed to come from. I know our shapes graced in and out, faces
in a slow float
of underwater evenings,
shifting in a pool light's cone through the frankly blue. ...
2
But then you know already, don't you God, the way the year
went on pulsing
toward a single day,
she and I suddenly in Chang Mai, Thailand, in her country,
because (they said later) she needed to get away. There in heat,
in dark, small houses,
her family's portraits--
no one I knew-hung in arches over doorways. A pretty woman,
dead, a blue-eyed old man. Mother and I walked for hours under
the awning of an outdoor market.
Again, the things of this,
no, that, world, moving and absurdly "beautiful": hills
of glass eyes and "whiteout," bowls of plastic-wrapped pastry,
whole tables lined
with imitation pinecones
tied to miniature cacti, red seahorses in watery globes beside
a spinning pig topped by spiders under their golden goblets
that turned and turned,
until I turned
and she was gone. Then, rising up from the dark ground,
I saw him, half a man, really, his hand open, outstretched.
The eyes, blue,
the eyes, up at me.
A mouth, moving, and his syllables-- Kor tow (you hold your breath).
Black in the palm lines and him up at me-- Kor tow ...
It was too hot. The human shadows
passed by, one then another, each
broken by a tangle of table legs below me, water in troughs, something
swimming at the edges of the aisles. The human, a pant of bodies
pressed to pay for linens,
silver, cameras, someone
(you hold your breath, snap ) above me then reaching for a picture
of a woman naked, and then somewhere else, a voice
floating out
from under, but mine,
saying I wasn't him, I was let to be whole,
saying don't stare and aren't you ashamed of yourself . ...
Until suddenly
she was back,
of course, and the haggling and our own relieved cries
came through. Later, she told me how his words were ones
of asking, a way
of saying please .
That night, when she must have held her body to me
( snap ), it was one of the blanks, god, like mine by then, as we stood,
stilled, caught in the shadow's
fix-in-place ( snap ), frozen
with the light behind us--our darks divided, falling to the floor.
DIDO TO AENEAS FROM BELOW
Still, I can see the shapes more clearly now.
Your back a straight line pacing between land
and sea, my own god-mocked writhing
in the ruinous marriage bed, going on and on,
until, at last, the sky's quick, mercurial
law pronounced: "Set sail. Woman was ever
a veering, weathercock creature." Centered,
more like it, in the epic's edges. And as for
the bad advice ("spin a web to delay him,"
my sister said, well-meaning, but duped by the end),
it left me with a mind's light in fresco--
a queen, though residual, mired in the unhalting
myth. Past action, snagged by the one act: that leap,
my desire fraying in its own heat, dear,
the impulse, ground down, in time, to mere mosaic.
And, of course, wearing a lacework of open mouths,
singes in my gown, the unspoken, still "on fire
and drifting...."Who can blame my habit even now
of returning to the fool's gold glint of your skin,
those days of my reason given to regale,
to your clamor, your netted events at sea?
I've memorized the minutes, skinflints you gave me,
all your hooks in, the eyes, chest, and shoulders,
every chiseled twist like so much kindling
to the whole catastrophe. And anyway,
wasn't it my speaking that let our story start,
the syllables made to pitch forward, the battle
beginning? The wine and banquet table, the fine
draperies damasked by an east wind up from the beach.
And the wedding inside a rain-curtained cave--
"the firmament flickered with fire, a witness--"
a new flame I wanted fanned, marriage blazed
in a kiln of the always present, the now and now ...
Until even that was then . And soon the rip,
your sword blooding the city with plots and gods,
rigging the blanched ships on their course toward
the long line of sons, not mine. Where are you now?
Why don't you come down, tell me how you loved,
or hated, that purity of having no
choice--kissed, taken by your mother's insistent
gist, bit clean in the goddess-jaws?
Come down. I've stopped fingering the saber's
phantom pain across the stomach. Speak to me.
Listen, here's what I remember of the day
you left: your ships rebuilt, the oars fresh-hewn,
your fleet setting sail on the same timber
which taught me how I had to crack and split
open, love, break out of myself, to burn.
NEIGHBORING
Each week, for his spreading plot of couch grass
and ungirdled shrubs, hem of his lawn about
to wander past the too-tufted hedges
of honeysuckle and buckthorn, my neighbor
trusts the employees from "Landscaping and Muscles
for Hire" to arrive on time and raucously
set right his lands: six men seen from my window
blowing the good form through. It's their work to pick
and choose. Though each flower is blue-eyed, they're paid
to sow a pricey hoof-and-horn-meal mixture
into the iris bed, but take an hour
to weed-eat all the wild skullcaps from the yard's edge.
Needless to say, there's no hope for a sprout
of alien yellow mushroom coming up,
stalwart, for the wet season, though the surfaces
of things keep trundling out to spoil the imagined,
the ideal. Frowning a bit at the lilac,
badly spindled, the smallest of these workers
lifts his hands in air, foisting clippers,
a black X, over the about-to-be-pinched-back boxwood.
Later, water from their labors streaming
through groundcover, staining the sidewalk caramel,
coffee, and rust, the men sit down in the symmetry
of cut grass and trimmed privet for their lunch,
a chance to dip into undulant
puddles of a cinnamon-scented stew
I've never tasted. Beside them is my
own stretch of dirt, the grass allowed to grow--
or not--in the sand-patched soil, a randomness
resembling a boy's first attempt at beard,
that stubbled cheek. Meanwhile, my neighbor's
oak roots insist on running over my driveway
roughshod, crazing the pale gray cement
to hugger mugger, a jumbled heap, out of order.
Reversing, soon the truck will bounce back down it.
We're so safe from each other, we never speak.
STUDIES IN DESIRE
1
More than eager to rid himself of a father--
that pragmatic mandate to "take only snaps"--
Edward Weston migrated from Illinois
to Mexico, marriage to mistress, driven
by a lust for purity that made him raid
surfaces and skins, finding, at first go,
the pleats of crepe de chine in a cabbage leaf.
After that, a door in a wall opening
behind a door in a wall. And beyond,
the slow spread of blond rocks mirroring,
mimicking the lintel from a wrecked house,
or the soft inner bank of a woman's thigh.
All the while scale starting to fall away
like an old attachment, the motive and motif,
as always, to move, to travel west. Intent
on anchoring the flesh, then finding a dead
man in the Colorado desert, that skull,
enlarged, up close, lapsed into fractured lines,
strands of separate hair just echoing
the cracked enamel of an abandoned car
he'd seen miles earlier. Still, the pairings
were random, bodies broken on a spine
of bad circumstance. For days his real art
was in warding off the cold, ice fronds
branding the lens at night, crystals forming
in a basin of fixer. Until one morning,
waking to sand dunes fingered by a night's wind,
he thought he saw the perfect inscription,
a new language of lift and bend, as suddenly
the waves took on just the look of her rib cage
when she arched the small of her back in the moment
he'd told her don't stop breathing . Now he could
step back, owning the likeness he'd chosen,
saying to her, stay with it, stay long enough ,
and the exposure, love, won't let you go .
2
Then in the doctor's office, story of a man,
his equipment and cravings, as he made her step
first into the exquisite light of the X-ray,
watched as it burnt past the ladder of her ribs,
finding the tubed heart in its hiding place,
the liver plump and radiant. The room itself
radiated in shortened wavelengths, a beam stripped
to the less than visible. Something like what
we used to call "soul," its measure unable to be
reflected or diffracted in time. From the new
science, a magnetics so frankly astral
as to pierce through flesh, muscle, any old
tabernacle of the solid, stopping
briefly at marrow to find a pin lodged
in the hand, a bullet taken to the head.
The morning Weston let the light take him too,
looking down to see his own torso fixed
in the picture, lungs revealed simply
as stacked caverns, veined chambers of tissue
as yet unwrecked, in the second he thought
he could see his own wet throttles built
for the inner and outer weavings of air,
suddenly--the ears rang, the eyes blurred--
another step and down he went. She propped
him against the machine to recover.
A wooden cabinet, a coil and rotary.
As for the body's sway of targets and breakers,
in that moment she knew there was no cut deep--
skeletal--enough, for the living.
Afterward, she bent down, tipped his limp, newly
printed form toward the metal, turned her face
away from his, stepping back. In his daze,
he thought he could hear her praying, murmuring,
no, Lord, you get nothing back , or was it
yes, Lord, here's the nothing that you get back ....
Copyright © 1998 Pimone Triplett. All rights reserved.
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