Ailbhe Darcy

After Alice Maher’s “Andromeda” Kind bolus of hair, we who have shoehorned ourselves into dream dresses, spooled Louis heels down fettled steps to grooms, or steeled ourselves in suits for the clinch, counter- signatures gripped in fists; we who have lain on carpets beside infants, parched for clear shocks of blue, feculence collecting in our drains, do not forsake us. Domesticated chyme, damp hank slap-lavished on pillow, pray for us. We who have fetched home inventing storage solutions, breaking up space, who feed you and braid you, scratch compact plans on compact days, give us thole to bear up. We’d bindle paradise and stow it where the dust bunnies futz, given leave. Swindle us, please, some less dear salvation. Croon of nootropics, caffeine, tacit utopia, game feel. How the way we live days is the means to live lives. Chevy us through. Tonight, in the kitchens where we make obstacles of each other, we’ll fiddle with the knobs of electrical cookers. Hobs simulacra for hobs, pixelating heat, steam, spall; tumble from above as if from nowhere. Let one of us fright, dash a palm too near. Let flesh char, hair. Give us our brimstone. Be in our waking.

To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth, the sky must seem a miracle. I’d commit the scene to black and white if I could, the sky bright and bottomless, trees gnarled as the knees of elephants. Helpless in his Biltrite pram, Ansel Adams is watching the clouds roll in. Then the clouds would gather speed, roll out again, and the camera pan down to Ansel Adams the man kneeling on granite, choosing one filter over another. It’s as though more and greater apparatus were needed to recapture that first exposure, says the voice-over: as though Ansel Adams were a pioneer toiling after the spirit, not just the body, of America. To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth, the sky must seem a matter of fact. It’s the mind beneath he wants to grasp, stowed in its smart black enclosure. I’d have his pram gather speed and transform, a cartoon robot against the heavens, wheels spinning, into Ansel Adams’ camera. Now the bright black sky is Ansel Adams and Ansel Adams the filter; light renders each tree a bouquet of paper; the Great Depression gathers like so much weather. To tiny Ansel Adams, newly arrived on this earth, the sky is what it is, taut with its isness. Some time before dawn, the section framed by interior blackens and brightens and each tree out there glows with itself, with the certainty of all Ansel Adams’ aspens. No one is watching but this one bewildered immigrant, toiling after sleep, saturated in monochrome. Sometimes it’s all you’ll find in the wilderness: Ansel Adams, tiny in his pram, composing the day just gone.

I’d a snip cut in his tongue. Blood scissored down his chin. At every squall I’d been unsnibbing myself and starving him. He knocked me so my nose coughed blood, punched a finger through my cornea. Blood blubbed on my nipple where his gums met. On the radio somebody was saying something about Syria. My son jerked knots of hair from my head, tears dashed off his fontanelle. He’d fixed my hips so my clothes didn’t fit. I blundered him once against the doorjamb: blood. I’d bit his father when we were younger, drinking harder, made blood come then. Twice I tried to leave him screaming, twenty minutes at a time, but couldn’t keep schtum. One breakfast I broke the mug that insisted “Don’t Mess With Texas.” Smashed it. And all the time I smiled so much my teeth dried. He made everything heavy. Like they say the bomb did for a while, so that Americans swam through their homes, eyes peeled, picking up everyday things and dropping them as though they were violated with light and pain. As though blood hadn’t always been there, waiting.