That Said (8 page)

plenty of wine

 

his gold mask

a perfect likeness

on which his highness

crayoned a faint mustache

 

his silk tunic

a supply of papyrus

an ivory comb

with no missing teeth

 

a mirror on which

to breathe a cloud—

the tomb's only weather

that, and dust

 

his dog

a golden ball

two old servants

curled at his feet

 

under the bandages

pharaoh, a boy,

buried with his hands

in his pockets

 

a star chart

carved on the ceiling

under which

a deep healing is taking place

Shooting with his Bolex,

my father kept nature in perspective.

He caught the trapeze artist catching

his partner in midair, swinging

 

in and out of my line of sight.

I was five. In nightmares, the body

falls straight into the dreamer's eye;

he wakes before hitting bottom.

 

Did I blink then, did I glance away,

the moment that she tumbled

like an angel out of heaven?

I don't remember, but I saw her fall.

 

My father slows the projector down

frame by frame; the trapeze artist

aims for her partner, and somersaults.

Her partner's wavering hand

 

connects with her sequined wrist;

but his other hand misses, clamping

shut on the air that frames her,

no connection, her body blurring

 

its slurred speech, as scanning

the sawdust floor, the camera locates

the broken italic of her flesh.

No connection! I can't remember

 

no matter how many times I see her,

no matter how many times

my father runs the film.

Projecting in reverse, he has her

 

climb the ladder of light

one more time, for my benefit,

but he can't rescue her

from gravity forever.

 

Backward, she bullets up toward

the bull's-eye of her partner's fist,

her face enlarged in its unknowing—

and lands back on the platform,

 

squarely on her own two feet!

Spliced into the same reel, unreal

documents of the commonplace.

A picnic under way. Then it is Sunday.

 

The living room upholstery is brand new.

The Frigidaire is white-enamel white.

Then, a lucky break to catch this,

I am crawling, hoisting myself up

 

my mother's skirts to take my first

steps, fighting to keep my balance,

staggering toward whatever it was

I reached for out of the camera frame—

 

held and lost in that drifting

instant of attention,

from which the body performs

its miraculous escape.

After Elder Olson

 

Six inches tall, the Russian doll

stands like a wooden bowling pin.

The red babushka on her painted head

melts into her shawl and scarlet

peasant dress, and spreading over that,

the creamy lacquer of her apron.

A hairline crack fractures the equator

of her copious belly,

that when twisted and pulled apart,

reveals a second doll inside,

exactly like her, but smaller,

with a blue babushka and matching dress.

An identical crack circles her middle.

 

Did Fabergé fashion a doll like her

for a czar's daughter? Hers would be

more elaborate, of course, and not a toy—

emerald eyes, twenty-four-karat hair,

and with filigreed petticoats

like a chanterelle's gills blown inside out.

An almost invisible fault line

would undermine her waist,

and a platinum button that springs her body open.

 

Now I have two dolls: mother and daughter.

Inside the daughter, a third doll is waiting.

She has the same face,

the same figure,

the same fault she can't seem to correct.

Inside her solitary shell

where her duplicate selves are breathing,

she can't be sure

whose heart is beating, whose ears

are hearing her own heart beat.

 

Each doll breaks into

a northern and a southern hemisphere.

I line them up in descending order,

careful to match each womb

with the proper head—a clean split,

for once, between the body and the mind.

A fourth head rises over the rim

of the third doll's waist,

an egg cup in which her descendants grow

in concentric circles.

 

Until last, at last, the two littlest dolls,

too wobbly to stand upright,

are cradled in her cavity as if waiting to be born.

Like two dried beans, they rattle inside her,

twin faces painted in cruder detail,

bearing the family resemblance

and the same unmistakable design.

 

The line of succession stops here.

I can pluck them from her belly like a surgeon,

thus making the choice between fullness

and emptiness; the way our planet itself

is rooted in repetitions, formal reductions,

the whole and its fractions.

Generations of women emptying themselves

like one-celled animals; each reproducing,

apparently, without a mate.

 

I thought the first, the largest, doll

contained nothing but herself,

but I was wrong.

I assumed that she was young

because I could not read her face.

Is she the oldest in this matriarchy—

holding within her hollow each daughter's

daughter? Or the youngest—

 

carrying the embryo of the old woman

she will become? Is she an onion

all
the way through? Maybe,

like memory shedding its skin,

she remembers all the way back to when

 

her body broke open for the first time,

to the child of twelve who fits inside her still;

who has yet to discover that self,

always hidden, who grows and shrinks,

who multiplies and divides.

Your absent name at roll call was more present

than you ever were, forever

on parole in the back of the class.

The first morning you were gone,

we practiced penmanship to keep our minds

off you. My fist

uncoiled chains of connecting circles,

oscilloscopic hills,

my carved-up desk as rippled as a washboard.

 

A train cut you in half in the Jersey marshes.

You played there after school.

I thought of you and felt afraid.

One awkward
a
multiplied into a fence

running across the page.

I copied out two rows of
b
's.

The caboose of the last
d
ran smack against

the margin. Nobody even liked you!

My
e
's and
f
's traveled over the snowy landscape

on parallel tracks—faint blue guidelines

that kept our letters even.

 

The magician sawed his wife in half,

then passed his hand through the gulf of air

where her waist should be.

Divided into two boxes, she turned and smiled

and all her ten toes flexed.

I skipped a line.

I dotted the disconnected body of each
i
.

 

At the bottom of the page,

I wrote your name. And erased it.

Wrote it, and erased again.

Thumbelina, poor sleeping child,

swaying in the hammock of a leaf,

nested in my left hand the whole

summer of my seventh year,

her skull just the size of my thumbnail,

her bird heart ticking against my pulse.

Only a child, I was an only child,

small for my age, but a giant

towering over a clump of crabgrass.

A belly button in the dirt,

the anthill was the slave plantation

I oversaw, ants laboring

in the fork-raked furrows,

hoisting heavy sacks of cotton—

crumbs twenty times their body weight.

To be a giant, you must learn to step

softly, carefully, so as not to hurt

the working earth.

That year in school I was learning

how to add. The backyard thundered

with my mother's yelling. “Ssh.

Don't wake the sleeping Thumbelina,”

I'd whisper into my left hand.

“Don't hurt the sleeping child,”

the shell of my left hand echoed.

At home I was learning to tell time.