by Lia Purpura
What to say in a situation like this, when seeing, you are unexpectedly seen?
Once I saw something that could’ve been a horror but wasn’t—my friend’s arm around his daughter, first at rest on the small of her back, then wrapping further to make a full circle. It was beautiful. Loving. There was no swarm of bees in the girl’s stomach. I didn’t have to see, in her place, that other girl, too big on a man’s lap, on the bus in Warsaw, being “dandled”—awful word that came to me and was everafter poisoned—and try, in a language I hardly spoke, to say “stop.” I didn’t have to see, for once, as a mother and leap up. Or remember anything with my body.
I look away. And if she’s still there, and she is, the girl in the bathtub, the girl in the article held by the words, and her name is Sylena—if I look away and she is still there, then I am not free.
How to stay with her? As if with the dying, by way of a vigil, which is to form, with others, a house of shelter, to make a green respite, a hospice, a place a traveler might rest while passing though? I watched the sun at the window over the—how strange the precision while my friend was dying—cafe curtains. The cool June afternoon resounded with, only once but loudly, a car alarm, and neighbors’ voices. I watched from the foot of the bed past the boxes of meds and the useless hundreds of vitamin bottles, and didn’t turn away from the moment of passing, though it was more like a ceasing. Because nothing stepped forth in the form of announcement, no herald. The light was just part of the branches scratching, and the scratching bore no message. It was June 24th. I did not turn away. The knob of the bed was an anchor, burnished. Like—may I veer, just briefly here?—the bare breasts on the statue of the muse on 33rd and Charles Street, her bronze breasts shining from touch, from men late at night, boys after school just touching for luck, and why not, walking with buddies and laughing, everyone does, it’s just a moment to be alive. So alive.
The bedposts were mahogany and they shone too, from years and years of touching.
In Tod Browning’s film, Freaks, the side-show performers “live by a code unto themselves,” says the narrator at the begining. The pinheads, the dwarfs, the bearded woman, the worm-man in a sack, the Siamese twins live in a camp in their carved and painted folksy caravans. The interesting tension in the film is between the arc of the story line and the viewer’s desire to see the freaks, to be allowed to see and not have to turn away, a kind of sanctioned privacy. The camera lingers over them and gives each the space to perform his or her own calling-card trick or accomplishment. The woman who used her feet as deftly as hands. The limbless man who moved like a worm and who rolled his own cigarettes with his teeth and struck a match and smoked. Beyond this, we are aware of waiting for something to happen. And it does. All the freaks, seeking revenge on the duplicitous “normal” performer, assemble under a rickety caravan to launch their attack; it’s raining, the freaks are crawling on their bellies in the mud toward the beautiful/evil one to do her in. But then, they all fall together in a crumple and each of them is lost to the pile, and their singularity, yes, their nobility, dissolves.
Once there was a green elephant and a purple elephant and they lived in a house together. The house and the elephants were part of a old German children’s game I played with at my grandmother’s house. They lived together in other ways, as shapes and textures, quite aside from being elephants, and now they come back to me as the pleasure of colors paired up in the garden world of alysum and lavender, purple aster and moss. The elephants sat squatly with their fat legs out in front and stomachs curved over. And the little wrinkles in their trunks were nice elephant touches. They were made of soapstone and were nicked with fingernail scratches. But they lived as colors best.
Today, purple calls sun down to light the soft green of thyme, undried and fuzzily growing. Green and purple pair themselves so the eye might gather on clover, lamb’s ear, morning glory.
What did the colors do to my eye?
Not once have I forgotten that the elephants were contorted, stubby, disproportionate.
Reader, I finished the article. About Sylena.
When I finished I had an inkling about a word. The word strafe came forth, unbidden. I looked it up for confirmation: to punish. To reprimand viciously. From the German.
What did I see, after I read? After I read, I stared out at the backyard and made a calming list: apple tree, loblolly, morning glory, ash. Rose-of-Sharon, tiger lily. 1-2-3 of black telephone wires against the blue sky, the Every Good Boy (Does Fine) for the invisible notes to climb. Checked the porthole of leaves that lets me see through to the next street. Sunk a bit into the deep brown of the shed. Opened the window a little for breeze.
What did I see while reading?
That once I used steel wool as a ball of tinsel in a pinch.
That when I said fuck you to my great aunt, and she washed my mouth out with soap (as soap occurred in the article, too), I studied the scratches in the very dull, very clean silver spiggots and, so close, saw the green spot where a drip wore the porcelain away.
Such focus made me dizzy, even then. “Custody of the eyes,” my friend, a former nun tells me, is the practice of training your sight to focus only on the meditation, task, prayer in front of you, and you let nothing else in. But what if the object in front of you swims, dares swim away?
I will tell you a silver spiggot can swim. And the sky be white. And a faucet bear a hurricane.
I focused on the green porcelain spot as if it were the sun. I found I could make it be many pictures—a mossy rock, a turtle’s back. But I tried to keep it the sun. I was maybe eight at the time.
Even then I focused hard.
I felt I might be tested on the things I saw.
NOTES
“Autopsy Report”: . . . the silent part of my life as a child is from Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Sketch of the Past.”
“On Form”: some italicized lines are from various poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
“Recurrences/Concurrences”: When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass is from Anne Michael’s novel Fugitive Pieces.
“Sugar Eggs”: Max Picard’s The World of Silence was consulted, as was Faberge Eggs: Masterpieces from Czarist Russia by Sussana Pfeffer, for historical material on Faberge eggs.
“The Space Between”: quoted material is from By the Shores of Silver Lake, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Max Picard’s, The World of Silence.
“Glaciology”: Italicized geographical material is from A Geomorphical Study of Post-Glacial Uplift, by J.T. Andrews.
THE AUTHOR
Lia Purpura is the author of Increase (essays), Stone Sky Lifting (poems), The Brighter the Veil (poems), and Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash (translations). Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the Ohio State University Press / The Journal Award in Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in Agni Magazine, DoubleTake, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program in Tacoma, Washington.
Copyright © 2006 by Lia Purpura
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Purpura, Lia.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-936-74721-4
I. Title.
PS3566.U
811’.54—dc22
2005029325
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