NIGHT WITH WINGS
Published in The Journal 29.2 (2005).
A fairy drowning
in a glass of milk
and a chandelier
posing as the god
of diamond earrings:
translucent,
dangling,
indifferent.
I’ve touched
the fairy’s skirt,
felt the pink
silk thrill and
gauze of it with my hands.
(How I envy
the cat at the bowl,
rapid white mouthfuls.)
The three old women
in The Conversation Club
won’t help us.
So near death
in pointy hats and scarves,
it may as well be Tuesday,
the mailman, or any
ordinary glass of milk.
I’m delighted when
the milk fairy rises,
a minikin woman shaking
the dampness from her wings.
Late for her date
at the palace of Versailles
she rushes the heavenly ballroom
of glass and garish glitter.
The chandelier opens and closes
its claw of merciless light.
Alas, I only have my glass
of milk to kiss goodnight.
ALARM PLEASURES INTO HUM
Published in Verse 23.1-3 (2006).
Mutiny awakens me,
the kingdom buzzing with saws,
all the fetishes abloom
which means a rubbing away until
blood or speech, each
to his own bright unraveling.
Red lives here, a nest
of nerves and twigs.
Doors unhinge and the roof
speckled with stars:
holes, navels, scars.
I have no floor,
no caviar, no mints.
I am humble as a tooth
and hunger.
And you are the messenger
without bell or tongue.
You are the messenger.
Come. Come.
NIGHT, WHITE, AND GOLD FOR LOUISE NEVELSON
1. Titular Fable
Two Young Shadows fell in love. One shadow whispered, I’ll meet you at the Moon Garden Gate. Black Excursion under a Black Crescent moon gentling Black Light. I was so young and thin, my First Personage. At the wedding, we ate Black Wedding Cake. I held a Night Flower and the band played Silent Music. It ended quickly. I couldn’t sleep. I waited for the sky to shift. And the sun like a promise erased us. The shadows turned white, Dawn’s Landscape, Dawn Column, Dawn Lake, Dawnscape. And then for a moment, gold. A ceremony for the elements, Royal Fire, Royal Tide, Royal Winds. I was queen with many women favorites. Queen Anne steeply pitched. The earth shifted again and defined my Night Personage Presence. Under the Black Moon, I relished Night Music and Night Presence in the Night Garden. In the end, the
End of Day was my wife.
2. Sky Cathedral
Shadow is my paint, the inky blue-black of it, shifty the way sunlight strikes and disintegrates. No light in the deep. My forest of black boxes. My milk box and lettuce crate. 38 boxes stacked high and wide. Each box, a theater in black. Diaroma with shapes turning inside: a wooden duck, hatter’s block, chair rail, ten pin. My empire dipped in matte black paint. My gothic rise without end or tip.
If I were a man would you call it “dollhouse?” Tracery, finery, and lace? A wall has certain mass and weight. Focus on forms and vacancies. I own my voids, deepest black. And now my secret is out: I’m motherhouse. My son in Maine while I studied art with strange men in Germany. And that isn’t all. I told the boys in The Club I had balls. Oh, draw your damn curtains, you won’t block me out. I’ve made you a toppling dollhouse. My high wall of boxes just for you. Are you my child? May I bathe you in flood? A wall can tidal, light disintegrate. Cathedral means holy and scrape. I could tear the sky, and the waters break.
3. Dawn’s Wedding Feast
(with a line from Paul Eluard)
Begin at the edge of skin. Where are you in the landscape? This fan with beautiful ribs. Black into gold. Now white. Dimension counts on its fingers: 1, 2, 3, 4, and I make my shadows light. Even white has her shadow. Dawn, her silver fan. In Dawn’s Wedding Feast forms are being wed. Table top to leg, porch post to bed. My first white, first flat girl-bride, forms and thighs laid on the table. Able, bounty, feast. The landscape unveils a wedding suite. You be the day and I’ll be the night, hand in hand in white.
Assemble for the feast. Assembly of pieces and the pieces assemble into shapes. The feast, a landscape of skin that begins with cake, a pillow, chapel, and baluster case. And then there’s the mirror where we meet. Enter and eat. Pause and sweeten, cheek to cheek. The body is meat. Call me lamb-chop, honey, or Louise. Please pass the landscape. Gravy of tears and white paint. I’ll never again marry, but the cities we’ll build, the shadows we’ll shape. White landscape where we forsake our names, undone by the love of making.
4. Dreamhouse
I wanted a house. House hungry. Bi-level. Split. A house to house me, feed me with. Wood
the color of gingerbread burned sweet. Licorice walls, black forest bricks. Frosting shaped into plump hens and pigs. Raisin-bread in the oven, butter slit. 30th street, my apartment in parts. Make use of each discarded piece. Toy chest and cherry-wood heart. I’d marry a house, sing songs, gather wood. We’d wed each day, woman and room. House who waits with longing kisses and stares. House who longs for me: body, box, oval, square.
Architect of shadows and shapes. Dream a dreamhouse, dreambox filled with people. Sweet filling like cake. Swilling with people, a boisterous lot. House of cozy, besotted, and cot. A fluted bed for a boy who dreams in Maine. A lovely space for people and shapes. House filled with finials, rectangles, chairs. Dozens of chairs for shapes to sit, for shapes to chat, liquor, and cake. Miles away with shadows and shapes, I wait for you in lovely space.
5. The New Continent
Couldn’t keep it whole. Total. Nobody would have it. I’ve destroyed so much. Even Dawn’s Wedding Feast. I would have given it away, but instead reassembled the pieces. The New Continent, another forest in black. That’s what I do. Lay the names down in shadow. Present in the shadows. Disappear in light. When everything is black, safety among objects. I take them from your bedrooms, kitchens, bars, schools, and will not name them banister or child. I love them all. I make a wall and build them each a room.
Look at time and it passes. I left time, a boy who dreams in Maine, a husband, Kiev when I was three, the names and shapes of things. The dark makes us present, equivalent. Even Self-Portrait in tattistone is black. Black is Relief. Safety in shadows. Anonymity of shapes. Table leg and armchair finally released. Difficult ornaments from someone else’s dream. Regret swallowed with memory.
6. Assemblage with Night
I’ll make room for you in my bed. Bed of maple, oak, ash, or my sweet favorite cherry. I kneeled in the dust, smelled it on his clothes. My father owned a lumberyard, which means wood was home. Familiar, though I plunged each piece into paint—black, white, and gold—to unhinge the familiar, anonymously at home. Later there was aluminum and steel. Whole monuments
storeys and stories high. High stories, stacking one story on another. Each box with letters inside. I turned to Lucite, epoxy, and glass to be closer to the light. I wore silver armor around my neck and walked through the day thinner than light. Darling, I was disappearing. Wind passed through the thin room of me. A tumor inside the room of my mind. So light and thin I could feel my skull lifting at the seams. At last, my mind released me. The boxes watched.
A wall full of stories. A wall like a letterpress, like letters being set. Leading like leather and setting. Kerning like kernel and keening. A wall to lean on, simple as hope. Either you would stay there or cut your throat. Such mercy inside shadow and form. Each box, a loving alphabet of its own. Each wall an assembly of letters left behind. Discarded, I found them on the streets
at night.
Look at time and it passes. Like a twitch. In the end, even fabric and paper were knit. The pieces, ready-made and willing to hinge. Assemblage, montage, collage, architectural debris, detritus, free, found on the street, offal, piecemeal, a meal in pieces but a meal nevertheless. Piecing is feminine. I saved each piece to hinge and knit. I gathered each and myself into the landscape. Salvaged a doorknob and a day.