by Diane Seuss
her fingers visible on the window ledge.
Her face is odd, sleek like a deer’s, with a deer’s
archaic smile on her lips. Maybe her mouth is watering,
but I don’t think so. I’ve looked at her gaze
with my magnifying glass, and I think she is looking
at me, coveting my chair. I believe she wants in
to the picture-plane, then through it, to sit where
I’m sitting and to paint the scene as she sees it,
maybe a lone intact pear on a naked table, or the wine
in the glass, to practice rendering transparency.
Maybe she’ll turn the ham to hide the gristly bone,
or ignore the ham entirely. Or she’ll paint just the grid
of the window with no blue-eyed woman looking in.
Each pane of glass will hold its own measure of the night
and a fingerprint or two. At the bottom of the canvas,
signed with a flourish in the lower right corner,
her name, whatever it might have been.
I Climbed Out of the Painting Called Paradise
and padded barefoot across the cold marble floor of the museum.
Outside, down the slate stairway, the ferry to the mainland awaited me.
Awaited all escapees. “Fee!” the Ferrymaster bellowed, but all I had
to offer him was my last apple, a Golden Delicious. He grabbed it
and took a bite with his horse teeth. He was so transparent I could
see the bite as it traveled down his esophagus and came to rest
in the cemetery of his stomach. “Shoes!” he yelled. It turns out
he had a cardboard box full of shoes just for this occasion.
Most escapees were shoeless. I chose a red pair, but they pinched,
so ended up with some worn sandals, the kind that White Jesus
wears in depictions of him walking his lonely road. Once they were
on my feet, the ferry began to glide toward the mainland like a drop
of cream down a small mirror. There was no turning back;
the museum was already lost in memory, which looks like fog.
The Ferrymaster used a long stick, pushed it into the silt at the bottom
of the harbor to guide us along. “That ain’t silt,” he said, mindreading.
“That’s escapees who jumped ship.” And I looked into the glassy water
and saw their bodies down there, layers of girls still radiant
with the green-gold light of Paradise, wearing borrowed shoes.
When we reached the mainland, nothing looked familiar, though
it’s said we were all born here. The Ferrymaster lowered the rusty
gangplank with a bang. I knew it was rust; the word was nestled
in a cubbyhole in my brain, but I’d never seen it before. “Git!”
he shouted. “And leave the shoes!” He talked always with exclamation
points, which I’d never seen before. They hung over his head
like the droppings of scavenger birds. “What’s this place called?” I cried
as he pulled away from the pier, but he only grinned like a skull
grins, without humor. My feet were boiling on the asphalt. I needed shoes,
and coins to buy them with. Shoes and a pile of gold. There were people,
hundreds of them, crisscrossing each other’s paths like ants or bees,
carrying tall cups and printed papers and paying me no mind.
Only one, with hair the color of a blood orange, stopped
for a moment, and stared. “Hey, beautiful,” he said, which told me
I was real. “Where do I go?” I asked. There were buildings
made of angles that bent sunlight, and roads curving back
on themselves like snakes and crossing each other like crucifixes.
“Home to mommy!” the man said, and he laughed and showed
the gold in his teeth. He was right; I had a mommy. A mother
and a sister. Mother with purple rivers of veins in her hands.
Sister with pale lavender ones at her temples. My mother’s hair,
white like a cloud of apple blossoms. I could picture her arranging
peaches in a bowl, and I remembered our house, small and gray,
and beside it a cemetery on a hillside, and I remembered Death,
and how the body is laid inside a box with a pillow for its head
and its hands crossed over its chest, and then the lid is closed
forever and the box is lowered into a vault in the ground,
and the vault receives its lid, and earth is loaded on top of it
and tamped down to keep the body from escaping. I remembered
it all: my yellow room, my little crib with decals of butterflies
and a black-and-white dog and a gold cat on the headboard,
how I’d compose stories about them in my head before I could
speak, and the yellow bird we kept in a cage, and the bog
behind the house, the brown velvet cattails and how they exploded
into sheep’s wool in late summer, and the milkweeds, their mysterious
seam like the smile of Mona Lisa with milk on her lips, how they
opened and their seeds were carried on the wind like ships
made of feathers, and Father, wearing a back brace, who would
not be getting well and who could no longer work or play or lift me
into his arms, and I went running toward it, all of it. I wanted
my mother, and this is why I left Paradise.
Notes
Lines in “I Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise” reference Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, William Carlos Williams’s poem of the same title, and Jack Gilbert’s “Failing and Flying.”
“Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl” and the other sonnets in that section all represent an invented form. It is fourteen lines, unrhymed, and each line is what Ginsberg called an American Sentence, seventeen syllables straight across the page, without the lineation of haiku. These first appear in Ginsberg’s collection Cosmopolitan Greetings. “American Still Lifes” and “American Run-On Sentences” are both composed of seventeen-syllable American Sentences.
“The Hand Has Dropped the Fruit and It’s Painted Where It Falls” emerges in part from Norman Bryson’s discussion of the apparently unplanned nature of Chardin’s still lifes in his essay “Rhopography” in Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (1990). “… here the form is in a sense ludicrous, or rustic; the hand has simply dropped the fruit where they fall, with the same partial inattention as in reaching for a glass it knows is there.”
The last line of “I Look Up from My Book and Out at the World through Reading Glasses” is from the same essay in Bryson’s book on still life painting. His discussion of blur in relation to Chardin’s still lifes is important to many of the poems in this collection.
In “Two Floor Mosaics” I am indebted once again to Bryson for his discussion of trompe l’oeil and “The Unswept Floor” mosaic in “Still Life and ‘Feminine’ Space,” and “Roman Floor Mosaic with the Head of Medusa” in his essay “Xenia” in Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. The epigraphs in this poem are found in these two essays.
Acknowledgments
32 Poems, “Girl in a Picture Frame”
45th Parallel, “Woman Looking at a Table”
A & U Magazine, “Self-Portrait with Double Helix” (under the title “It’s Like DNA”)
The Academy of American Poets, “Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid”
The American Poetry Review, “Self-Portrait with Amy (Creation Myth)” and “Self-Portrait as Mouthpiece of an Anonymous Benefactor”
Ampersand, “Stateline Pastoral” and “Sentences”
Bat City Review, “Self-Portrait with Levitation,” “American Run-On S
entences,” “I Look Up from My Book and Out at the World through Reading Glasses,” “Self-Portrait under Janis’s Shoe When She Sang ‘Ball and Chain’ at Monterey Pop, 1967”
B O D Y, “It Seems at Times that Silence” and “Silence Again”
Crab Creek Review, “Self-Portrait with Emily Dickinson (Rebirth of Mourning),” “Silence Is So Accurate, Rothko Wrote,” “The Heroic Penetrates the Quotidian,” and “Two Floor Mosaics”
Creative Nonfiction, “Eden: An Outline”
Devil’s Lake, “Hindenburg”
Indiana Review, “Walmart Parking Lot”
The Iowa Review, “Still Life with Self Portrait” and “The Hand Has Dropped the Fruit and It’s Painted Where It Falls”
Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, “Self-Portrait with Freddie M (Invention of Thunder)” and “Memory Fed Me until It Didn’t”
Michigan Quarterly Review, “I Look at My Face in a Red Mylar Balloon Tied to a Mailbox,” “Bowl,” and “Self-Portrait with My Dead Looming behind Me”
The Missouri Review, “There’s Some I Just Won’t Let Die,” “Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl,” “The Knight’s Dream,” “Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber,” “The Last Still Life: The Head of Medusa”
New England Review, “Memento Mori”
The New Yorker, “Still Life with Turkey”
Pank, “Self-Portrait: My Legs”
Quarter After Eight, “I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise”
The Spectacle, “Self-Portrait with Herbarium”
My gratitude to Hedgebrook, the MacDowell Colony, and Willapa Bay AIR for residencies that supported my work on this book and offered me a glimpse of Eden. Thank you to Jeff Shotts for seeing these poems, and therefore, me. Thank you to Jane Huffman for being my reader, for offering astute critique, and for friendship. Patrick Donnelly: Je t’adore. Love to Gail Wronsky and the badass girls we were. This book would not exist without Conrad Hilberry’s lifelong mentoring and friendship, and Gail Griffin’s sisterhood, hilarity, and love. Mikel, Kevin: I remember everything about you. My family—mother, father, sister, brother-in-law, nieces: I will always return to you. Dylan—my son, my best reader. I love you.
To the painters and the painted; to the escapees.
DIANE SEUSS is the author of three previous collections of poetry, Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, winner of the Juniper Prize, and It Blows You Hollow. Seuss was Writer in Residence at Kalamazoo College for many years, where she received the Florence J. Lucasse Fellowship for both teaching and scholarship. Seuss has lived in Cincinnati and New York City, but she circled back to Michigan, where she was raised on the state line.
The text of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
is set in Adobe Garamond Pro. Book design by Rachel Holscher.
Composition by Bookmobile Design & Digital
Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free,
30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.