Stay, Illusion

by Lucie Brock-Broido

  Unexpectedly; what is only left of you is only me.

  PAX ARCANA

  The Amish housemaid lived in one small room inside the lemon cookie jar

  Of our mother’s mother’s pantry at the lake in Canada.

  Her linens were chenille and bumpy, worn. Her only jewels were bobby pins.

  After supper, after covering the crust of the rhubarb pie with a tea towel,

  She retired early to her room. She took off her cotton cap.

  She undid the hooks and eyes of her stiff black apron-dress,

  Stood reading the chapter from the longsome blue-bound book.

  Just as the light on the lake was dimming, at the end of days,

  She snuffed out her one late wicker-shaded lamp, and lit (with a curiously

  Long-reaching safety match) the waxing crescent-moon above the provinces.

  She folded her floury hands beneath her head

  And went to her knees by the doll-sized bed.

  CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

  What if it is true now

  I do not want to speak of that

  Which has been given me to say?

  See, each four-legged rests his face against

  The fence’s slats and asks

  No questions: why or how. How long.

  How dare you come home from your factory

  Of autumns, your slaughterhouse, weathered

  And incurious, with your hair bound

  Loosely, not making use

  Of every single part of the horse

  That was given you. What of his hooves.

  His mane. His heart his gait his cello tail

  His joy in finding apples fallen

  As he built his coat for winter every year.

  FATHER, IN DRAWER

  Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him.

  With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it.

  Also directives from our DNA.

  The nature of his wound was the clock-cicada winding down.

  He wound down.

  July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes

  Of cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell.

  Barges of coal bloomed in heat.

  It was when the catfish were the only fish left living in the Monongahela River.

  Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in

  The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in

  By the slink from the strap

  Of his second wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still

  As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin.

  The nature of his wound was musk and terminal. He was easy

  To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast.

  In the old city of Brod, most of the few Jews left

  Living still may have been at supper while he died.

  That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle tinsel color, washing

  To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west, Ohio-bound.

  This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.

  II

  EXTREME WISTERIA

  On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.

  The hydrangea of her crushed each year a little more into the attar of herself.

  Pallid. Injured. Wild in ecstasy. A throat to come home to, tupelo.

  Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.

  Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear.

  Case history: wistful, woke most every afternoon

  In the green rooms of the Abandonarium.

  Beautiful cage, asylum in.

  Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not have been there.

  So few wild raspberries, they were countable and triaged out by hand.

  Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others, sateen.

  Extreme hyacinth as evidence.

  Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves

  Will (perhaps tomorrow) die.

  High editorial illusion of “control.” Early childhood: measles, scarlet fevers.

  Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home;

  Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations was for her.

  Unusual coalition of early deaths.

  Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence,

  In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of such.

  Wisteria, extreme.

  There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.

  POSTHUMOUS SEDUCTION

  The orchard grew excellent,

  Good mass of apples assembling, one angel burned, looped

  On the wire fence, in a bowl of gold.

  The animals were curiosities to most

  And this was years ago. Now we do tricks for

  Them, anything, for even an ersatz miracle.

  Now, my skirt is full of briars from

  Leaning in the late marsh grass,

  A small red spider spindling in the hem (most splendidly).

  One must keep watch over

  The good doctor, ministering as he does in the darkening

  Room, by the braid of light shed by the gold mass of good

  On the barn’s musty floor. Come,

  Messenger in an ankle-length

  Black coat, our velvet one, where once the orchard was ablaze.

  NOTES FROM THE TREPIDARIUM

  At the Museum of Modern Art, she had to quit the shadow box

  Of Kafka’s ruin of a life; she couldn’t stand the hugeous gob

  Of bug emerging green beneath the metal bed.

  As a child, she would never open the closet door alone

  Again to choose which dirndl skirt to wear to school.

  A conference of muddied seagulls would surely now be hooked

  On every wire hanger mimicking the hooded crows amassed

  In Hitchcock’s one-room-schoolhouse yard in 1963.

  Now the Eskimos are frightened at the robins in their weirdly warming

  Village because their language has no word for robin—not quite yet.

  A cough (small as Keats’ before his brother even knew) set in.

  Quit this crying out from fear in sleep; it isn’t merciful.

  Stop making such a racket in your wooden shoes

  As you go up and down the master stairs.

  MISFITS

  Where I grew up in blue, before the rich red seasons of American,

  I had thought that everything would always

  Go our way—save Marilyn Monroe weeping

  On the dry plains against the noosing

  Of the rag of mustangs wild to keep alive

  And the rugged craggy men who took them

  Down, to sell their hooves and haunch, their meat for meat.

  I, soon to be an element of the lunatic

  Fringe, am willing to kill for their right

  To life: I thought the horses beautiful.

  I cringe to think I stood for nothing, for a jar

  Of jam and marriages, my usage of exotic words (chimerical), my lilac apron, me

  Starry in our own home-movie, handsome, noir

  As the one dark brooding stallion, kicking going down.

  IN OWL WEATHER

  In the pamphlet, on page three, you will find me

  Clutching the yellow parasol, the one I used

  To get away with carrying. I loved once, in

  The long-ago, nesting in the empty granary

  With my barn boys, all of whom then wanted

  Me. How many nights it was I did not wed

  Them, preferring the company of animals

  Who did not speak and slept curled to me and set

  Me free thereafter to the feral dark, and then

  To overwintering. In owl weather I am

  Apprentice to t
he common law of harm.

  No rook, no reed, no rain, only

  Overhearing in the next room

  The Surrealist’s boot growing into

  The foot-soldier’s missing hank

  Of limb on the terrible concrete in the city

  Of Tehran. This is the hour when no living

  Creature can lean its forehead into my hand.

  The owl in the barn is so still

  No one takes my word that he is real.

  In the pamphlet, on page seven, you will find me

  As a tiny odalisque on the endless blanket

  Of the bower of my mother’s bed, coquettish,

  In a poplin nightgown and my mallow-color shoes,

  With all my lionlikes about me—it is clear I am

  Quite pleased with me. I wonder, can he

  Look up to the slip of moon late days

  At the very moment I am looking too,

  I wonder, is he warm, somewhere, in hay.

  HUMANE FARMING

  Come now, rain, close the eyes of the diminutive philosophers

  Which are always open—foraging, inquiring, remembering

  (The cruelest of them all). Ten thousand turkey chicks

  Huddled in like barberries shook down from their twigs

  After a great storm in the big gray barn. Those that could still

  Stand were struggling to come closer to the tin-red heat lamp

  That is Mother to us all.

  Warm (she is), long gone.

  The fixed gaze of a barn owl,

  Or Copernicus, thinking in his age,

  Of a kind of brooding between the fixed stars and real life.

  I wash the same slice of pear over and over again, the homeliest,

  Most mottled one which tastes more tart.

  Clip-winged, unbeaked,

  Take refuge by the heat, the scald of thought, made most magical

  For those, in dark, who find their own way by the light of others’ eyes.

  EIGHT TAKES OF TRAKL AS HIMSELF

  I. OF THAT WHICH MAKES A CHILD BLANCH IN SLEEP

  Frost voluptuous, put down

  Too early, eavesdrop on the bell tolls, mignonettes.

  What is it that compels you to linger

  In the precincts of the hours

  When domesticated creatures

  Well know how, by heart, to sleep.

  Silver-fishing; household gods.

  II. ACQUISITION OF THE PRONOUN I

  He was bashful as Li Po reaching

  From his butter-colored boat to touch

  The smudge of moon, eventually. Gloom

  Is prearticulate.

  III. DEMENTIA PRAECOX

  Aged five, found unconscious

  In a pile of snow on a bowler-hat—

  Shaped hill outside of Salzburg. Half frozen

  In the heap of it. The other half his sister,

  Margarethe, her hair the dark plain

  Of a harpsichord, her face an autumn day so brazen

  It is gold. Apprentice apples ripen in an azure bowl.

  IV. THE QUIET GOD CLOSE HIS BLUE EYES OVER HIM

  His wish to cast himself

  Where chestnut-colored horses

  Raised their hooves against the sky.

  V. TO THE STARS, A PHYSIOGNOMY

  He had never read the face of any soul.

  The mouth a dim albino light.

  The eye, to him, an apothecary jar

  Splayed by silver implements.

  Stars are maiden-monks in churchyards at Saint Peter’s,

  Led by wild wishing-wolves back home.

  VI. ALWAYS THE SELF WILL BE BLACK AND NEAR

  A sister’s ruddy skirt rustles like a cave

  Entered for the first time by a humankind.

  He was in love with her. Such as it is to live in the same

  Room with in-and un-intended deaths.

  As a sleepwalker, he was precocious, pricked

  With constant pharmaceuticals.

  VII. THE WHITE ANGEL

  What is it that compels you

  To rearrange the blown-glass bottles

  In the windows of a dusking hall.

  Cyanine, half-born; his own father was not his own.

  Green, the land of goats extinguishing

  The cool rooms of a hospital.

  Red barges floating on the tips of madder ponds.

  Amber, a semblance of the ancient Chinese poet, face-down

  In the plough of sallow reeds at night.

  VIII. IT IS A LIGHT THAT GOES OUT IN MY MOUTH

  Of the dear dead, how beautiful

  It was to walk in the misbegotten shadows

  Of the chalk deer

  Huddle-grazing

  In the frisk of misbelief,

  By day, with you.

  JUST-SO STORY

  I was at home under the shade of the gumbo-limbo tree

  Reading the story of what happened to the little elephant with unbridled

  Curiosity. Still, I ask too many questions, even now.

  I was imagining the common turtle on his Lucite island

  In the hollow of the claw-foot tub in our attic dying off with

  Little drama all that summer long, the water getting imperceptibly

  More shallow every day, while I was riding brindled horses

  Up the mountains in the West. I wouldn’t know the day he stopped.

  It didn’t hurt, they told me; he just went to sleep in sun.

  I stopped loving a boy one day, which day, exactly,

  I wouldn’t know, much the same as the never-knowing

  When or how the trout I caught regrew the wound

  His inner cheek took on (I was groomed to throw him back)

  After the whisking of the treble hook went in,

  And was then yanked out. Or what hour it could have been

  When once my father was at peace,

  Alive, wading with me, knee-high into Slippery Rock,

  And I stood there with him in the middle of the creek

  Curious in wild sun and wondering.

  SLEEKER, CURRIER

  The hides hang in the odd

  Two-dimensional shapes of the animal they once were.

  Sow, in a rucksack, unfolded, now in the shape of a dull

  Ache or a continent, flattened like a blotch of hollyhocks

  On a fifteenth-century shield. Clove—

  Pink, be kind: a mercy is wrapped in a scarf made of autopsy

  And hoodwinking. A bull

  In the shape of his meadow, clovering, incarnate, coming home.

  You will not be there, will you now?

  A satchel of black cherries

  Over-ripening in a skirmish of anatomies, puckering

  Like the soft spikes of the currycomb. Then groveling,

  Grooming the animal, even sleeker for the ride.

  MENTAL MUSEUM

  There is no getting around the gun

  In your mouth and the aftermath, a vast migration of stem cells

  (We could become—anything—a membrane, a clean new

  Set of lungs, whole heart, an artery to replace the one

  That had toughened) that could have grown into

  A crop of mauve scars, the lot

  Of us, broken at the throat, bowered in the ink

  Of last speaking, less pink against the paler walls—with this,

  You have made of us a scruffy tribe.

  Beautiful bright weapons

  In the Novembering, Without you I am even fewer, less.

  What an unlikely trundle you have left of

  The two beds of the sky.

  Pray I

  Will be seeing you again, you

  Bus-bound for some other country to be alive to die in, just

  Not—here, in the roses and bitumen, the corrugated voices of such

  Widow-murmuring, where the tenor, too large for good

  Health, appeared on the last night of the year, alone on the sno
w-Covered hill to sing.

  The bindweed

  Has no stairway to climb up to—

  Look—in this one glass case, a breathless history

  Of the unthinkable, each artifact

  In the shape of a night-finding bluff or

  A species that had never been named,

  Sewn up by scars, Trafficking in salt, as I have.

  SILENTIUM

  In hospital how high the heat for amaryllis to push out from the furrow of its soil,

  Unbroken as a child fleece-bound, making every Ashkenazi angel red in snow.

  A microscopic scene of what might have been—if one chromosome

  Had misshapen differently. Behind the crescent of the curtain “C,”

  A meadow of some suffering, but quietly. Blue-eyed, my wilder gift,

  All afternoon the toy wolves have been feeding, almost invisibly it seems.

  The marrow of the reeds of wood-wind taps the windowsill. Brother, love as if

  I couldn’t know that this is bliss—where I am now, the frost so terminal

  I keep it in a teacup-tundra lit by cures of cream and unrelieved oblivion.

  A GIRL’S WILL

  I.

  In the garden’s bowl of sugar, a company of bees is circling me.

  They have my back—not stinging,

  In the shape of Isadora’s scarves in August wind.

  II.

  Such a long time gone for anyone to find me here.

  III.

  Come to the crinoline fields with me, and fold.

  I lay down there once, quite alone,

  In the oval shape of a Vague.

  IV.

  It is true, for example, that Miss Duncan kept her protégées (her

  Isadorables) tucked in her own school of silk, batiste, and hurrying,

  Where pique unfolded boundlessly, i.e., the dead

  V.

  Don’t quarrel and will listen, finally, to Lucie now—still scribbling

  Beneath her white uncorseted umbrella in the first draft of an early fall.

  THE STORY OF FRAULEIN X

  Where one last late-blooming bird

  Sings in the Empress tree.

  Where the hens lay

  Their eggs without effort and cannot blink.

  What is it they are thinking of?

  I would not marry to you

  Me—bedeviled as a fig tree bound

  By burlaps for the winter,

  All its branches and their thrushes braided

  In and strapped by frost and willfulness

  Like a patient run amok

  Whose limbs are swaddled

  By their endless canvas sleeves

  In an aching sack of self.

  Such beelzebubbery!

  Why is it I didn’t love at least

  Not living things.

  GREAT RECKONING IN A LITTLE ROOM

  All the colors of the trammeled covers in a bed of opium.