Carol Muske-Dukes

Where the snow effigies stood hard-packed and hosed to ice in front of the frat houses, in the middle of the little bridge over the stopped river, my leased car spun three times before the chainless tires caught. Each time round I saw a face: the man who imagined he loved me; the woman who confided in me, the child who cried "no" upon meeting me, as if he saw at once to what use we put those vanishing invented selves. The slurred tracks, ringed dark on the outbound path, froze and unfroze for weeks after the party to celebrate spring. Down the road, the local museum considered the Ice Age. The glacier slid in and out of its lit shape through a fan of color transparencies, each ray labelled with an age, a thaw, the gauged bed of the moraine. Showed how the ice junkheap hauled the broken shapes in which we live, cave and gully and flat. And a further dissolution, part of a shape we would not recognize for centuries,— like the coins that tumble down the dark slide to the weighted spar that triggers the mechanism that lifts the needle to the jukebox disk: "Blue Moon"— you saw it standing like an atomic field, charged with particles: little "you's" and "me's," estranged suddenly from the vanity of their motion— and the prefigured feel of it, music and moon, turning full force into its mindless will then stopping, my foot on the accelerator.

It was too big to take on the subway so she came to it every day that winter in the room where it waited on one foot, sly seabird. She sat down and opened her hands, parted the wings one by one till it flew ahead of her fingers singing the lame foot skidding on gold. The sun turned its back on the glass and paled as she sat obstinate green-eyed her foot on its foot pumping. The fire died. Snow hissing at the window. Above her head a baroque hailstorm failed in 4/4 time. She sang, unable to hold the bright hinge to her heart. Lame savior she sang. It bowed as she left and sat, chastened by scales, wondering.

When she came to visit me, I turned my face to the wall— though only that morning, I'd bent my head at the bell and with the host on my tongue, mumbled thanks. Cranked up, then down in my bed— I told the nurses jokes, newly precocious, but too old at twelve to be anything but a patient. I slouched in my robe among the other child-guests of St. Joseph, the parrot-eyed scald masks, the waterheads and harelips, the fat girl with the plastic shunt. The old crippled nun on her wheeled platform dispensed her half-witted blessings, then was gone like the occasional covered gurneys sliding by my numbered door.Gone told me I'd go away too— orderly as dusk in the brick courtyard: the blank windows curtained one by one. I could not abide that yearning face calling me home. Like the Gauls, in my penciled translations: I saw Caesar was my home. Through the streets of the occupied city, his gold mask rose, implacable. In the fervent improvisational style of the collaborator— I imagined pain not as pain but the flickering light embedded in the headboard, the end of the snake-wire uncoiling from the nurses' station. The painkiller winked in its paper cup, its bleak chirp meant respect should be paid for the way I too wielded oblivion, staring at the wall till six, gifts unopened in her lap, the early dark deepening between us.

I try to make myself afraid, the way you must have been afraid, stepping out onto this stage— but with a fear so pure, so perfectly informed that you strode out shouting. Here, where the neon yellow arrows painted on the floor shoot forward underfoot in blackness—beneath the hanging sequence of tinted skies—out toward that mindless immortalizing light, now dark. Now I think I feel the heat you must have felt rising from the front rows. A gaping fire door, a furnace: your single body standing here with no shadow, swinging on itself. Had you been a fool, you might have thought that they loved you. They never love you, you said. They are hungry for the god in his gold eclipse, the pure you on fire. John and I move quickly, each with a handful of ash, scattering. The sound of no sound falling into the cracks in the boards, the footlights, the first row. A small personal snow: a prince of dust, a villain of dust. Each part you played drifting up again, recomposing. I open my hand, I let you go—back into the lines you learned, back into the body and the body's beauty— back into the standing ovation: bow after bow after bow.

—for Lynne McMahon In her bedroom, she set a convex mirror on a stand, so that when the visitor looked in expecting to see the familiar line of lip and brow, what appeared instead was the head up-ended— the mouth a talking wound— above the eyes, upside down, fluttering, like the eyes in the skull of a calf slung on the blood-hook— or a baby's lightning blink, dropped low in the bone cage about to be born Walls washed down with the cold pardons of the nurse. Gem green paint restored from old scrapings. Here and there, a trifling, a lightening beyond the author's original intent, which was in the drawing room, positively spleenish. From razor bits of palette, touch-ups: Mrs. Woolf's favorite color. The Trust ladies place the still-ticking brain of Leonard's wireless next to the empty brass stalk with its single blossom: old black hat she wore like pharaoh gazing down the Nile-green Nile. That's her: the flat drainboard of a face set so fiercely against the previous owner's trompe 1'oeil beard and jug. The simpleton's request: a picture of her young— So the trees walk up burning, the birds speak Latin for the dull-witted, drenched palette the glimpse of whirlwind in the pond where their handfuls of ash drifted down and over the great mown meadow next door where the Rodmell August Fair is on. My daughter astride a steam engine, bored as any child with the past. Later makes an X (her favorite letter) with two sticks held up to the window of the great writer's garden study. But the mirror standing in the air a glass knot tying and retying itself would repolarize, and she, drawing near, reverse herself. A woman's rapt beautiful face drawn downward by gravity, sorrow, lit upward by the flame of age— could turn over, floating, then submerge, amniotic! Across the green from the bedroom window she saw it: a fin cleaving dark waters— "and that became The Waves." The ladies sip and look. Vanessa, pregnant, laughing, crosses the garden. Two women walk among the hollyhocks with shears. The hedge dented by one's fluttering hands. Inside her sister's body: fluttering hands. Annie's white sweater catches on the thorns of blackberry canes. I pull her free then pick six little ones, busy, like the swarm cells of a fetus. Or the enlarging failure in those rooms, unchecked growth: death-drawn, claustrophobic. The wind, up from the South Downs, blew the two women across the garden, their shadows like crossed sticks. Sisters. One shrugging slightly, a loose mauve shawl. Where her sculpted head sits now, a stone wall. She sat at this table eating mutton and bread. He was talking about the socialist initiative and she turned away: someone was knocking at the window. It was the French photographer we surprised on our way out, shooting the forbidden interior through the dark glass.

Imagine for a moment the still life of our meals, meat followed by yellow cheese, grapes pale against the blue armor of fish. Imagine a thin woman before bread was invented, playing a harp of wheat in the field. There is a stone, and behind her the bones of the last killed, the black bird on her shoulder that a century later will fly with trained and murderous intent. They are not very hungry because cuisine has not yet been invented. Nor has falconry, nor the science of imagination. All they have is the pure impulse to eat, which is not enough to keep them alive and this little moment before the woman redeems the sprouted seeds at her feet and gathers the olives falling from the trees for her recipes. Imagine. Out in the fields this very moment they are rolling the apples to press, the lamb turns in a regular aura of smoke. See, the woman looks once behind her before picking up the stone, looks back once at the beasts, the trees, that sky above the white stream where small creatures live and die looking upon each other as food.

Stuck pat with strawberry magnets to her sub-zero are all the stages: gill slits, lungs, sex—stopped at the third month, when the fetus is sucked out into a clear plastic bag. Reaching in for a quick soda, you can almost feel that flexible wind on your face. The fetus (named Jennifer, it says) develops in color-photo sequence till the second trimester, when (more bold-face) the kid's a murder victim, in cold blood, of Mom. You beckon to nothing: milk cartons, cans, stand in the chill blast of the suction door and grab your Sprite. Day and night she stands outside the clinics with the other Lifers. My advice: don't take her on. I once learned phylogeny provides intelligent options—but survival does not always select for insight. Down the line: there's a smug printed sign talking up adoption: Right. So, knocked up, I'd owe my body to an forgiving god, who'd swallow my offspring t00? Here's a fat man rattling a blood red genie in a pickle jar. No wedding ring. See that woman, head bent—they're hurrying her through the police cordon, past the screaming faces? I've walked where she's walking now— and where she lies now, I once lay, behind that secured door, near that white waiting table. My mind divided, momentarily, as if the world were just birth or no birth, what I could or could not do and still seem human to myself. Who first fixed in my head that slashed membrane between life and death? (I'd go toe-to-toe against her, but she stops me cold with her small, past due figure of remorse.)God, what next? she asks, leaning against her icebox, her T-shirt shouting how she pities the unborn. So do I. But not as much as I pity her, quickening with hate. And love: for those would-be lives inbred to a set of family gestures. One day on our way to the frog pond we take my daughter's hands, saying nothing—one on each side. She asks me why I don't see what she believes. I want to say I do, I see through all the cross- wielding apologists to why she, alone in her kitchen, grieves. It's sad. The big frogs croak like TV preachers pad to pad. But look: at the pond rim she points out tadpoles—hundredsm ink-black, legless. See? we both say. My daughter kneels, tries to cup them in her fist, but they're too fast. Born again and again into the limits of our perception, they swim intuitively, the way we think. She calls that revelation. We're surrounded by the bull chorus, a booming, backlit percussion.Call it revelation

Sometimes, at dawn, I think I hear the high sobbing cry of the muezzin hanging in the sky before it’s light but then, I drop off to sleep again.

Here's how we were counted: firstborn, nay-sayers, veterans, slow-payers, seditionists, convicts, half-breeds, has-beens, the nearly defined dead, all the disenfranchised live. Once everybody had a place among the nameless. Now we can't afford to be anonymous. Consider, they said, the poor, the misfit—consider the woman figuring herself per cent. Consider the P.A. system making a point so intimate I petition not to be anybody's good guess or estimate. I ask to be one: maybe widow-to-be watching the sun diminish brick by brick along the jail wall and also that green pear on its drunken roll out of the executioner's lunch basket. At 12:01, 02, in the cocked chamber of the digital clock the newsman said:There'll be less work in the new century.

The pure amnesia of her face, newborn. I looked so far into her that, for a while, the visual held no memory. Little by little, I returned to myself, waking to nurse those first nights in that familiar room where all the objects had been altered imperceptibly: the gardenia blooming in the dark in the scarred water glass, near the phone my handwriting illegible, the patterned lamp- shade angled downward and away from the long mirror where I stood and looked at the woman holding her child. Her face kept dissolving into expressions resembling my own, but the child’s was pure figurative, resembling no one. We floated together in the space a lullaby makes, head to head, half-sleeping.Save it, my mother would say, meaning just the opposite. She didn’t want to hear my evidence against her terrible optimism for me. And though, despite her, I can redeem, in a pawnshop sense, almost any bad moment from my childhood, I see now what she must have intended for me. I felt it for her, watching her as she slept, watching her suck as she dreamed of sucking, lightheaded with thirst as my blood flowed suddenly into tissue that changed it to milk. No matter that we were alone, there’s a texture that moves between me and whatever might have injured us then. Like the curtain’s sheer opacity, it remains drawn over what view we have of dawn here in this onetime desert, now green and replenished, its perfect climate unthreatened in memory— though outside, as usual, the wind blew, the bough bent, under the eaves, the hummingbird touched once the bloodcolored hourglass, the feeder, then was gone.