Stay, Illusion

by Lucie Brock-Broido

  The sheen of this, blood-loved as the wound in the haunch of a panther

  Downed in an asylum of his own. No, there were no keepers there.

  Yes, I am dissembling. In Sweden, the room to put you down was dim,

  Candles of no-color held in brown sand-bottomed bags, lit

  Like the crooked path on the way to an old sacrarium. After the offering

  In a hammered copper bowl filled with big black grapes, I will let you go.

  When I say yes, the streetlamp’s cylinder of light will come into the room.

  It is the last light you will ever stand inside the perfect circle of.

  Swallow swallow, deep as the skirts of lingonberries brambling in a blacker forest

  And shallow, shallow, you will lay you down.

  UNCOLLECTED POEM

  There should be one spectacular of ruin, red, mid-tragedy.

  In Normandy, in the common orchard,

  A monk is born into a bottle made of mercury,

  Spliced onto a single plum tree twig,

  And lives inside the blown glass

  He grew up into.

  Dovetail two

  Unlikely dreams. Unfold for me but do not leave me

  Wise, or full. Do not leave me knowing, known.

  Speak to me, not with the meekness of your middle years

  Or with the mildness

  Of a small-brained animal On its way to abbatoir.

  Let me: marrow, let me not Know exquisite things—

  Reveal your form, illusion

  Stay—a cut sewn up by the quartet of sad-stringed

  Instruments made of cat-gut ligatures still used

  In certain open-hearted surgeries.

  GOULDIAN KIT

  What makes you think I’m an eccentric, he said, in London

  To the brood of the reporters who had gathered to report

  On his eccentricities—the tin sink light enough for traveling

  But deep enough to swallow his exquisite hands in water filled with ice.

  A budgerigar accompanies, perched atop the fugue of Hindemith.

  You are quivering now like the librarian reading

  To herself out loud in her Arctic room

  Composed entirely of snow.

  A broadcast (high fidelity) bound by the quiet of the land and

  The Mennonite who told him

  We are in this world, but are not of this world,

  You see. From the notebook of your partial list of symptoms, phobias:

  Fever, paranoia, polio (subclinical), ankle-foot phenomenon,

  The possibility of bluish spots. Everything one does is fear

  Not being of this world or in this world enough.

  There is no world I know, without some word of it.

  III

  OF RICKEY RAY RECTOR

  I. AMENDMENT SIX

  If you expect this story to be in tact you shouldn’t have that

  Faith in faith, not here, or in a loping place

  Where Rickey Ray won’t be so frightened by the dark in Arkansas.

  A folk’s story of unanswerable griefs—he told me

  You will probably not see me anymore after I went home.

  Already what was left of him

  Was like a barncat leaving just the heart of it, the offering.

  II. STAFF PERSONNEL REPORT JAN 22, 1992

  inmate Rector reports guards are setting loose chickens in the holding cell

  pork patty turnips jello muffins milk

  pudding—says saving, for just before lights out

  reports assorted characters are peering in his window by the towers light

  Enough of possim and their teeth, the gold shag’s carpeting,

  The chinaberry tree back home. inmate making holling sound

  III. THE PORTABLE BAPISTRY

  For you who was taking this down for him, he is all kind about his feeling

  For you, you all dressed up like scarecrows Taken down by other birds.

  In the Polaroid he is to his waist in water, plumpened,

  Sitting huge and humped up forward, dazy, grinning wide.

  This day shall you be with me in paradise.

  IV. STAFF PERSONNEL REPORT JANUARY 23

  inmate glimpses limousine cruising thru prison all those

  he maybe hurt are huddled in the backseat there

  6:46 am howling

  7:07 am howling and dancing in cell

  8:10, & thruout day barking while sitting on bunk

  began noice’s with his voice like a dog

  Years after her death, he told me, Mother visits him at night

  In her tulip dress, clutching her crocodile pocketbook.

  V. ON CLEMENCY

  Miss Flowers, he said, Not to worry I’m still voting for your man Miss Gennifer.

  Governor Clinton, in his mansion on that last frost night, from time to time

  Was having hard time catching breath

  Some say

  You will be sleeping when you die.

  VI.

  How cold that ice cream fell going down.

  They is my good ice cream, he said.

  VII.

  Touches hands of his sisters, first time without glass

  —from Ledger, Visitation House

  A silver canopy over the enormous Elm of him.

  VIII. DEATH-WATCH LOG JANUARY 24

  one steak real done

  fried chicken w/ heavy gravy

  brown beans three rolls

  koolaid, cherry & he said, for later—

  pecan pie for just after when he would went to sleep

  IX. from the other side

  Rows of folding chairs unfold, a brood of heavy winter coats settling in

  Assembly for the witnessing, like pigeons Nurse in quiet shoes

  Attending with sickness bags

  Then a streak of gold light visible through the top of chamber

  Where he is You can hear him helping out

  X. from the other side

  Velvety curtains for the viewing room pulled back, tell them

  Pastor Motton, what it was like the vast bulk of Rickey Ray

  Still bound in with straps of blue still breathing the lump

  Of gauze holds in his fist his heart’s

  Green light still fluttering

  Pie still waiting where he left it there

  XI. A LOT SEES—BUT ONLY A FEW KNOWS

  I love you Mother in your queen Anne’s chair

  Geraldo thank you for your company on TV

  Bird of prey, waiting like a hearse outside when I’m alive

  SALT LICK IN SNOW

  That you would, one day, stop breathing before

  My own breath was held.

  Were I to wake, muffled through the balsam

  Woods, scent of myrrh and mineral.

  Would that be tonight.

  That we had conducted ourselves with no austerity all along.

  Nearer then, a child was a child herself, thin thing

  Offering a teaspoonful of civet to the likes

  Of us. Beneath the low sky lowering, unclear this time

  Of year, you cannot tell

  The salt lick from the pale and mackerel

  Air around it. That I did not promise. I will never sleep.

  MOON RIVER

  What is it exactly that you mean when you call me

  Your “huckleberry friend”?

  What if soon you, too, will go down

  Like a sheepdog who has tasted blood on a gentleman’s farm

  Far outside the coal belt, and I do not get to see your

  Inflorescence one more time, what then?

  Like a lantern-boat half on fire somewhere down

  The crazy river of your mind,

  Framed by endless strings of small whortleberry lights, ablaze,

  Still, I go on crossing you in style. My affection has always

  Had its girdled caveats—

  A mushroom-colored cummer
bund sashing

  The waist of another man, or my feeling formal knowing

  When to take the fork out of the toaster, at the very moment of

  The metaled tines contacting the one electric outlet in the barn.

  Even though you will not speak to me again, not in this life,

  Where fear accompanies you like a yellow buggy or a carnivore

  With dark spots and a long-ringed tail

  Unhitched to anything,

  I forgive you—everything.

  Besides,

  You’ve always been such an odd uncanny half-genet of man.

  OBSERVATIONS FROM THE GLASGOW COMA SCALE

  EYE OPENING IN RESPONSE TO PAIN

  Doctor, for the longest spell,

  I was bordering on the inexorably humane, of a sudden—

  A conspiracy of grace.

  Whole summer in a blaze of gods.

  PERSISTENT INAPPROPRIATE SPEECH

  Not so much nattering please, says the impresario,

  The nurse’s commandant on call.

  Still others mumbling

  About salted beans left soaking in brisket pots

  At home. Some olden Jews are still compelled to hide

  Their jewels in smallish alligator carry-ons.

  DOES NOT OPEN EYES

  A Weimaraner with its two invalid back legs

  Tucked in a wheelbarrow rolls down the Avenue Calais.

  His master pulls at this contraption with a leash.

  Were I to wake

  I would not be sanguine if my own hind legs were nulled.

  SMILES OR COOS APPROPRIATELY

  I was the center of my Mother’s world the moment I discovered she could die.

  LOCALIZES TO PAIN

  A half a century ago, the Nanny kicked our cocker spaniel,

  Waldo, down the basement stairs, repeatedly.

  When we cannot find the puppy we are told

  The creature went, instead, to live the good life

  On a skein of land they called “a Farm.”

  CRIES, BUT IS CONSOLABLE

  I believe that he was safe there. I am consoled.

  The gravestone on my plot in rural Pennsylvania reads:

  She Couldn’t Help It, Pals

  INAPPROPRIATE RESPONSES, WORDS DISCERNIBLE

  The heavy rains have been quite excellent for my composure.

  I compose myself again in heavy rain.

  The trees, stick-figuring, define the view from here.

  The waves

  Are pathographical, disquieting.

  RUBY GARNETT’S ORNAMENT, CIRCA 1892

  See, how she tucked her tiny spectacle,

  A songbird, behind the chimney bricks

  And sealed it shut inside her frayed blue purse,

  Some silk grief ago

  Against the indigo of company.

  She wrapped his lemon-feathered form

  In soft strips of newspaper wetted down

  With powdered milk, gentle not to bend a wing

  Or break a brittle claw. Her mummery.

  In the Dumas Brothel Museum,

  In your glass case now, canary, in your

  Tin can purged of all its minerals,

  You are beautiful, grotesque. I am in this

  Freight and keep myself.

  I write home from Butte in mercury.

  I take it back from you. I am on my one.

  THREE MEMORIES OF HEAVEN

  FIRST MEMORY

  It was before the harp, before rain or words

  Before the ox waking in ice.

  Before the great warmth turned down in the granaries.

  Before the women carding the wool by its temperaments,

  Spinning the flaxes away from the rusts, in the valley

  Of the stitching in the dresses they will wear tonight.

  SECOND MEMORY

  Almost like a bird that knows it’s about to be born

  Before the cut of cinnamon or the linnet-colored

  Birthmarks marking with tarnish-scissors even paler things.

  It was before I placed my body next to yours, longbone

  To longbone making a kind

  Of love that never curdled like the milk at mouths of caves.

  It was a time when wren-boys

  Were allowed (out loud) to cry.

  THIRD MEMORY

  It was all before the bleating or the tears

  That I knew the animal must know, before his mistress does—

  When she will cut the path toward where he is,

  Must know the scent her footprints leave in straw

  Must know no heaven, even if it’s there in its saffron

  Slice, circled with thimbleberries, quick-silvering.

  Put your hands

  Into the sheets and tell me where the needles are.

  RED THREAD

  Ash-home. Sack of delicious apples.

  Roof of mouth is keen but quiet now.

  How is it I did not know the swath

  Of you, rare, more rare.

  Whole family decimated

  As if in war.

  Old wheat, color of ransack or curlew,

  Jews wandering, coppering, each

  In their croft. The pond, iced-over now,

  Thinner yet for skating. Inside, a man

  In his smoking jacket, smoking,

  Withholding. Silvering of hair, most

  Exigent of needs. In a vase, the red dust

  Of gillyflowers aslant by the bed.

  Thou shalt not be dead.

  Last hour

  Loving was the first one,

  Cruciate as the wings of a dragonfly, at rest.

  DEATH, XXL

  Wisdom is ruin.

  Dispatch in white chalk left out in the summer rain.

  He is not gone, I asked.

  Once (and this was long ago) in the cortège, milkmen wore their folding caps

  And took them off, and workers bent their heads to bow.

  The train passed slowly through every belt we know: Prayer, Tornado, Bible, Grain.

  No matter what time it was, I will go on missing you again.

  In your paddock you were folded like a carriage horse grown too large for his stall.

  Also, there were no carriages left.

  Please to find a goddamn other noun. Lie down in it; stay here.

  As a young boy, some said, you had once been in heaven, a moment’s visit

  Through a locked door constructed for the nonce.

  Escutcheon in the shape of a boy in the Sun belt, holster round his narrow hips.

  Two tin guns. Ephemera.

  Villagers, wallflowers all, huddle under cotton quilts splotched with bougainvillea.

  Here, come trespassing.

  Prayer and Amen. Transistor radio.

  He is not gone, I asked. Shot self. My love.

  In the Rust belt, sleep deranges, rearranging our sister’s darker rooms.

  In the sheepfold, the maid extinguishes her harp, puts her fingers in the felt glove

  Of a persistent vegetative state.

  LITTLE INDUSTRY OF GHOSTS

  How is it you can explain their living here with me, leaning

  On their cellos, doleful and plenty.

  In my single person tax-bracket of one alive, there are more

  Living here with me not alive

  Than are. You are a good

  Dog now. Rising, supposing, loom large for me.

  Turn down all the rows of white sheets in the rows

  Of white cots for your wounded

  To settle in. Look, the boy with a cane walks

  Three-legged down our Avenue, three-quarters

  Of a cur, but he’s as gifted limping as the elegy you wrote

  For me and I am still alive! It was a poem clear, here

  In hindsight, as flounder flesh unwrapped from

  Its bed of newspaper, unspoiled. Would that you come home

  Now, healed and appalled.

 
; It could have been reparable; we would have gathered

  Like a din of two nurses at the metal rails of vigil

  At your impossible bed. Would that we, erstwhile, will.

  Would that our Liam were living still.

  SCARINISH, MINGINISH, GRIMINISH

  You will not be a sepia hound in my dream at Trotternish, even

  One more time. Not a lighthouse keeper

  Landlocked in at Insch, not the deep sea diver with the metal

  Brain in the icy umbraged waters of the Outer Hebrides.

  Not at the Firth of Lorne, where each man downed is a tricycle

  Turned over, most of his spokes blown off, not even, were

  You luckier, in the heap of small black mussels

  Washed up on the Isle of Skye, huddling but still whole.

  You will come back as a starfish, two arms lopped off,

  Scooped up by the mop-topped schoolboy, Fearghas,

  Who will take you home to Dingwall when the blotted tide is low,

  Collect you with his blush balloons, his tin Sienna soldiers,

  Coloring your endoskeleton with a spot of Maize and Timberwolf

  From his set of crayons, flattering you with a Thistle touch, then some

  Dandelion flourishes until his suppertime, one last last dab of Fern—

  After which he will go on to his maroon arithmetic and Dostoyevsky

  And his other sullen Prussian Blue and Orchid arts.

  THE MATADOR

  The last I saw of him was on the final neurasthenic afternoon of his harmonica

  When he lost his hair and said I did this to him with my grief,

  As the pink halo of a monk’s scalp began to shine up through his own.

  My grief can cause male-pattern baldness in a man!

  This was his voyage, remember now, not mine.

  In my own life’s journey, I once found him, many laters, bewitched

  Into a tiny iron matador (he wore a hat) on the folding table at a yard sale

  In a small New England town, holding out

  His midge of scarf—ridiculous and red,

  Now overwrought with aching from the wind in Spain.

  When was it that you say I knew?

  DOVE, ABIDING

  I have heard

  That you were living like a goat in solitude

  And turning in the proxy and the mud of it.

  Don’t be coy with me. You

  Were mean and you were plump. Dove,

  Mistaken. You are not good. Heart

  The color of a tray of entrails in a Harlem shop

  For meats. I have heard Miss X has had a vision

  In her rooms. It was uncomely,

  A mess of hungry colors, like the Rockettes

  Singularly beautiful but all together hideous.

  There is no single flower that is not singularly

  Beautiful I’ve heard. I have heard you did not care