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Read my interview with The New Orleans Review here
ON THE FIRST level of Hell with Paolo and Francesca sits Max Jacob. You had no choices, Francesca says to Paolo. You had no choices, says the other to the other. Jacob in his dirty pin stripe suit just laughs and laughs at them. He has a brief affair with one of Darwin’s finches. She visits only at night. She permits him to stroke the yellowish down of her breast, which occasionally he reads by.
LIFE ON EARTH is pulled down hard on a man’s head. This life was made by hatters. A busy street is only coffee, bread, and hats. The smell of a man’s hat, an old man’s hat, is like the nostril of a horse. You are breathing in what something beautiful and ancient has breathed out. You are breathing silk interior; heat and life. An old man’s hat is necessary. You see that when he takes it off, the hair and skin abruptly float away.
WALKING BY MYSELF through cities I think of knives, the symbol of marriages and doom. Or I recall the lucky spoons my auntie loved and hung on a rack by the table. She did not love her knives. They lay in a drawer. My auntie ripped her bread by hand. She said a knife is almost useless, being one thing only.
THE LITTLE GIRL has turned away her eyes, covered up her face as if ashamed. In this picture, she has chanced upon a rotting cow. The giant teeth exposed, its mouth has burned away like film burns slowly in a theater. Her shadow darkens the scrap of fur shaped exactly like Texas, matted against the belly of the thing. The cow seems to gleam with wetness like turf in darkness. It all manages to fetch—perhaps because of the angle of the sun or the invisible photographer, or the horror of the girl—the effect that the cow is smiling, a perfectly contented dead animal.
WHERE I SHOULD have come to Judas impaled by huge incisors, instead I discovered Antonin Artaud, still writing his manifesto, “To Finish with the Judgment of God.” All his teeth were pulled. It was so quiet there, I even heard the scratching of his pen. He had no jacket for the long approaching winter. A kind of dog had chewed his hands and feet.
COULD THIS BE SATAN, whose drop from Heaven made this hole? I thought to myself. It was a tiny child, hanging by four straps, like the heart suspended in its branches. That baby’s just a memory. My mother had left me to swing in the shade.
ADAM’s on the right, his name is Red Earth. His face is burned, as if made of ash. He lies on his back on the sand, a tree growing out of his sex. The tree contains all metals known to us. The branches spread like veins into the dirt and cities and the rivers of the world. He gives us choice: to be the anvil or the sword.
EVE STANDS on the left. Her belly, pouched, is a pelican’s mouth. She is neither mercurial nor shy. She clasps a fish in one hand, a cloud in the other. Look closely now: the fish is not a fish. Above her are the sun and moon, even in the sky. Her cloud is full of lightning bolts that strike like serpents touching mouths.
THE EAR’S AN EARTHY GARDEN with its own forbidden tree. God still walks there leisurely in the cool of the evening. The tree has never been discovered. That’s why the garden stinks of rinds; the swells of full fruit thudding in our heads. “The porches of my ears,” Dead Hamlet called its tiny gate, its nautilus design, where someone’s often whistling.
I AM AN ACTOR playing myself, watching my grandfather down the road. He is an actor, too, the most distinguished of them all. He wants to speak. The words barely flicker on his throat’s wick. Write it down, write it down, I tell him. I hold this man by the thick of the arm, its muscle of wool. And he exits: he and his small white papers.
WE STRIPPED and swam to the Green Island. It was earliest summer. There is such a thing as midnight sun. Asa let me touch her from behind, her body so much older than mine. Under water she yelled something—what? I don’t remember. What we call sorrow is merely failing memory.
IN HER HOSPITAL BED, my mother drinks her water from a plastic cup. They have stolen me under her coats so I can visit her. They’ve made a show of this. She sits straight and strong in her chair. Memory’s like skipping stones. I’m in the lobby with my Coke. I’m carried to the room where light pours in. Her face as blurry snapshot when she smiles from under her handkerchief.
I’VE BEEN TO THIS STATION, but I will never go back. A woman in a green gown was clasping a shoe to her ankle. The stiletto on that shoe the length of my pointer finger. The other foot was bare. The woman stood up, threw her purse on the crook of her shoulder. Tik-tump, tik-tump, and away she went. The train pulled out. Tell me, what shall I do with that image? She walks on the stilt of my finger.
I MADE THIS paper boat for her, who finds it difficult to sleep. She imagines she is floating on its little stern, here, under her sleeping mask, under the covers. All you’ll need is one plain sheet. It’s folded like the beak of an archaic bird. With your fingers, pry the wide beak open. You are opening the beak. You are climbing inside.