PHANTOM LIMB
Before the trash bin, slipping
from my finger as I stick
inside crinkled packaging –
in the water of the lake I swim
like a common nettle stinging
the edges of its band sharpening –
in the cold, my skin constricting
for an instance, the metal loosening –
long since jettisoned, my gold ring
its drop against marble singing –
my indentation lingering, a figment
of freedom and constraint, this wrestling –
a stupid thing, my ruminating –
I still feel it clinging
KUNSTKAMERA
Let us dwell not on how Ruysch’s
curiosities fell into brutish hands,
only that Peter the Great transformed
a noble fascination with the human
body into something monstrous,
the mystery of Ruysch’s embalmings
sold and housed in this, the empire’s
first museum. Alongside a nine-striped
armadillo, pangolin, two-headed goat,
a display of Peter’s much-loved
beautiful butterflies now floats children’s
severed heads in jars, a ghoulish
collection of defects and deformities
in glass cabinets. It is the artistry
of the still lifes that draws us in,
a cover story for our flagrant staring.
Ruysch’s liquor balsamicus so refined
he was accused of sorcery, but behind
claims of Spirits of Zeus and Poseidon,
the secret to his liquor lies in clotted
pig’s blood and mercury oxide.
Working closely with his midwives,
Ruysch gathered his specimens,
hoarding fetuses with extra limbs,
conjoined twins, infants with heads
enlarged and those sunken, a trove
of children’s skeletons. The doctor
could not resist adding several
artistic flourishes: flowers and fishes,
bonnets and lace cuffs his daughter
assisted in placing on the delicate
skin. Freakish? Nay – ingenious!
Who else would (tastefully) place
a child’s leg in the selfsame jar
as scorpion? Ruysch did. Impossible
as it is to choose among favourites,
one diorama eclipses the rest: a fetus
of about five months with placenta
in an antique jar decorated with coral,
a seahorse, an array of shells. You may
find it beside a woman’s prepared
pelvic organs, her bladder and uterus.
MAYING
How are you beating in my body, heart?
How is it you dwell here? Guinevere
drew the colour from my skin like marble
carved from Porta della Pescheria’s archivolt.
As lances bore toward her in the tower,
she ran from her abductors. Fair Winlogee,
catching my breath from these rattling lungs,
I never rode a horse to escape you; I only
clung to men to flee. Clutching these reins
so tightly they chafed me, Gwenhwyfar,
I too went a-Maying. Too rode from wood
to meadow, slipped a ring from my finger,
and fell into a sleep. It’s no Arthur I need
now, no King of Tangled Wood, Malduc,
Melvis, or Lancelot to keep. Only pluck me
from these dreams before they burn me,
Findabair. I’ll become Ellen Terry as Lady
Macbeth, a dress of beetle wings, crocheted.
FOUR OF CUPS
My arm bruised where the nurse drew
four vials of blood. It was a prick
to see if I pour out normally,
or if my mutant genes coagulate.
Patterns blur: my knuckles
against carpet at 1 AM, the next morning
waiting for the train carrying massive green tubes
to inch forward, then reverse, move forward again.
In this way, segments of the Keystone XL Pipeline
clear the intersection. Peering through
the fetal assessment unit’s second storey window,
I watch a pigeon regurgitating crop milk
into her fledgling’s gape. One bill fits within
the other, a keratin speculum.
Inside the examination room,
the specialist’s tear-dropped window screen
resembles interconnected ovaries.
We cover up so pedestrians can’t see
our naked bodies on the bed’s off-white
wrinkled sheet. I dress and leave
and it finds us again outside the casino –
the train’s waiting tunnel, endless and green.
DOVECOTE
Feet folded beneath my body
like the talons of a dove.
I don’t speak its name and forget
the shape of its vowels on my lips.
Each step a hesitation,
the ice forming underneath.
My mother plucked out her hair.
The mourning dove, its feathers.
Calluses torn from my heels,
strips of skin pulled away.
The stillness of its body startled me,
the pigeon fallen to concrete.
Will you deny those who cannot speak
the mouthing of syllables?
It is the body’s impulse to heal
before the mind perceives.
In the morning, each step stinging,
I walk toward uncertainty.
Collagen eschews a woven formation
for the scar’s glassy alignment.
In the bathtub, my feet white
with bands of swollen tissue.
Forgetting is a kiss inverted,
a breath drawn from the lips.
Let me turn another corner
in this tender blue skin.
A drop of blood from its beak,
claws curled beneath its body.
A wound that never heals
but is torn open again and again.
That’s what love is. Outside
my window, the endless cooing.
LAST WALK
Tired of wandering the same prairie
roads outside the city, tired of parking
on the same patch of flattened grass
beside the trail marker. Tired of climbing
over the barbed wire, tired of waiting
for trucks to pass before crossing the dirt
highway. Tired of brushing ticks off
the fabric of tucked socks, plucking not-yet
swollen abdomens. Tired of descending
into the branches. Tired of finding a way.
Tired of feeling limbs snap back as I follow
you toward a path, tired of reading the map.
Tired of squishing purple berries between
index finger and thumb, tired of feeling
numb. Tired of swatting flies, tired of saying
I’m thirsty, asking for a drink of water
from the bottle you carry. Tired of deciding
how much farther to go. Tired of taking
the same tired photo, tired of rusted tractors
parked in a more or less straight line,
tired of being tied to the grid superimposed
on the terrain, tired of crouching beside
a hole in the ground waiting for a glimpse
of something alive before turning away.
PRAYER FOR THE UNDOING OF SPELLS
With this ring, prompting mall jeweller
to deem me waitress in want of a talisman –
this ring invoking the superstition a vein
runs dire
ctly from fourth finger to heart –
this ring I had resized three times,
unable to adjust to the grip it held on me –
this ring I dream I wear again,
wriggling it back and forth over my skin –
this ring a nervous tic –
this ring reached for as I once reached for him –
this ring causing welt, inflammation, bruising –
this ring discovered stashed in a blue organza bag
and held in my palm, lighter than expected –
this ring a symbol, a stone, now shed
I DREAMED HE CAME OVER
With a two-year-old little girl
that was his and turned out to be yours too
and we didn’t even know you had a baby
He was going to raise her
and you weren’t going to be involved
IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
The Christ Child appeared to us true
to life, his wooden body finely carved,
then sanded, his skin painted and glazed,
blond hair falling in loose ringlets.
His fat cheeks blushed red as the apple
held in his hand, a slight cleft in his chin
inviting us to take him in. The cloister’s
nuns commissioned for him cribs of gold
and silver, dressed the child in garments
of lace, silk, and satin, said their prayers,
then rocked him. Sister Margaretha
was gifted her doll upon taking her vows,
and woke to the child playing in his crib,
bidding that she hold him. She took him
in her arms, the poor thing. Did Mary
fare any better at pinning a cloth diaper
on the baby Christ’s powdered bottom?
As the child cooed, she swaddled him.
He kissed and cuddled her, then said
solemnly: If you do not nurse me,
I will take myself away from you the moment
you love me the most! Margaretha held
the Christ Child against her bare breast
and he suckled cupid’s bow on her nipple,
drinking. On Sunday, she organized
a pageant for the other lamb’s brides:
the child resting in his crib of velvet finery
glimpsed a later-in-life version of himself
riding the palmesel into Jerusalem. Mounted
on an ass, his naked toes dangled above
the donkey’s hooves, wheels of his cart
squeaking as his toy encircled the lavish crib.
Margaretha didn’t anticipate the strangeness
of this encounter for the baby; the child
began fussing at the sight of his twin,
contorting at the palm fronds thrown.
As Margaretha burped him, his brow
furrowed at Older Jesus’s majestic pose,
then his lips curled into a neat smile.
Was it happy recognition of divinity?
Gratitude for Margaretha who’d surely
grind her bones for his warming fire?
His passing gas sounded a squeal of relief.
ANNIVERSARY
In a Toledo cellar, two euros revealed ex-voto
of the Hand of Fatima with birds of paradise.
The last El Greco my husband showed me
was Burial as I sat in a pew, unmoved,
escaping the Eye of Conscience. We descended
on escalators cutting through ancient walls,
passed a pigeon’s emaciated body,
Bosch-like and grotesque, its feathers bristled
from its needle beak. Beneath this gold ring
is a depression. Yours, a promise to throw it
in the sea, and moments later to always keep it,
the band I unearthed at the top of a mountain
as a preteen. On our third anniversary,
I changed my flight. We fought and cried.
Our trains went in opposite directions,
Bloomsday severing the thread it had tied.
OBLIVION
Halfway from Toledo to Portugal,
I became a ghost in the empty seat
next to you. In Spain, my chest
tightened with clumped hair
and matted sheets, a round stone
wedged to my heel telling me
I had to leave. In my mind, I was
still crossing Lethe superimposed
on the Bow River where I once
watched you scatter a canister
of ashes and bone, and later crossed
its frigid water to escape a bear.
I feared the knee-deep current
would pull me away, not because
my interpretative skills are weak,
but because I believe my body
matches how I feel inside – flimsy.
I still think I can go back and find
you reading the Tao in the Madrid
laundromat, telling me I can’t just
run away from the parts of myself
I like the least. But where outside
of oblivion will I ever find peace?
In any of those lonely train rides
through picturesque landscapes,
passing vineyards and churches
I saw only through your screen,
tell me, did you too feel free?
CATALOGUE
I was beside you at Mount Parnassus,
beside you at the Villa of Masks.
Beside you at the Bow River,
scattering your aunt’s ashes.
I was beside you at Keats’s apartment,
beside you at Maison Muzot.
Beside you in the streets of Paris,
the Appian Way, the catacombs.
I was beside you at Auschwitz-Birkenau,
beside you in the room of hair.
Beside you viewing the markings
the prisoners carved in the stone.
I was beside you in the hallway of faces,
beside you at the killing wall.
Beside you in a swarm of teenagers
riding the bus, singing Sean Paul.
GORGON
If the body slows when oxygen thins,
my skin solidifies to my particles’ hardening.
Dying conquers in degrees; calcium ions
binding with protein ossify when adhered
to muscle, so skin turns to stone. The gorgon’s
steady gaze anticipates rigor mortis. In breath’s
choking, atoms tire, or as in decomposition
seep outside the body and are released. Death
is a transformation, my atoms indistinguishable
a table, this book, or tree. The ego
is freed in the sense that I breathe the same air
as Homer, the same fire Heraclitean –
but there is no me. Even the cells of my brain,
which holds the self, my personality,
are swapped out in seven-year cycles.
All that I seem to be could be shaken
by blood clot or incision, disrupted by an OD.
These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do,
given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. Our bodies
in their movements cling to the concrete world,
a glimmer caught in a gorgon’s petrifying stare.
SATURN RETURN
Before carving reindeer, walrus tusks,
before horses painted on cave walls,
all most early humans did was fashion
axe heads from hunks of chalcedony,
jasper, and flint, cryptocrystalline quarried
and hauled to the carving site. We worked
obsessively, breaking blocks of basalt
into hammerstones in teardrop shapes,
beating rock against rock, lithic flakes
falling like snow, layering skin with ash.<
br />
Was it ritual, pragmatic, a nervous tic?
One of us strayed from the carving site.
Another pulled a clamshell in two,
and found an iridescent whorl not unlike
the wash of green when we gazed
at the night sky. I wanted to hold him
like a brother, this artist, when I saw
him sleeping in the loam, but flattened
to the bog he appeared so lonely.
Were we all this alone? It was the sky
that called us forward, to depart
our planet’s terrarium to celestial spheres.
The stars that lent us these atoms
would take our flicker of energy within.
We’d be calmed in our coming home,
like holding a slab of rock perfectly fitted
to our hands’ flesh and striking stone.
LEAVING THE GARDEN
The museum bottlenecks
with bodies in the entranceway,
drones bumbling into one another.
This leg cramp that woke me up,
demon Rumpelstiltskin, pulls me apart
when you speak my name.
The lights dim as I stand before
The Garden of Earthly Delights, bigger
in person than on my leggings.
You linger in the antechamber,
gazing on The Last Judgment triptych:
two of its panels devoted to hell.
If the room is closing in it’s because
it’s too small for the both of us now.
The grey-brown ink of Bosch’s warped
figures drew this study of monsters:
a thrown brochure setting our ship
of fools in flames as I thrash through
the fire for a lifeboat to cling to.
Bosch’s grotesques – his beehive
and witches – were drolleries
in the margins of our melded book
of hours. We left the garden
and our life turned into grisaille panels
slamming shut. The creation
of the world sealed in a glass orb.
Earth and all its wonders closed.
THE UNICORN TAPESTRIES
As hunters enter the woods,
we wander the room of tapestries.
Medici’s horn in the corner
casts a gleam that seizes our vision,
a narwhal tusk masquerading
as the unicorn’s tapering wand.
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