Dorothea Tanning

Don't look at me for answers. Who am I but a sobriquet, a teeth-grinder, grinder of color, and vanishing point? There was a time of middle distance, unforgettable, a sort of lace-cut flame-green filament to ravish my skin-tight eyes. I take that back— it was forgettable but not entirely if you consider my heavenly bodies . . . I loved them so. Heaven's motes sift to salt-white—paint is ground to silence; and I, I am bound, unquiet, a shade of blue in the studio. If it isn't too late let me waste one day away from my history. Let me see without looking inside at broken glass.

Never mind the pins And needles I am on. Let all the other instruments Of torture have their way. While air-conditioners Freeze my coffee I watch the toaster Eating my toast. Did I press the right Buttons on all these Buttonless surfaces Daring me to press them? Did you gasp on seeing what The mailman just brought? Will the fellow I saw pedaling Across the bridge live long After losing his left leg, His penis, and his bike To fearlessness? Will his sad wife find Consolation with the Computer wizard called in Last year to deal with glitches? Did you defuse the boys’ Bomb before your house Was under water, same As everything else? Aunt Til grabbed her Silver hand mirror Before floating away. The dog yelped constantly, Tipping our canoe. Silly dog.

Ever imagining the dire, the sudden the menace with no thought of the gradual, the lingering itch of whatever. That was my sister. A stomach ache had to be diagnosed. “Oh, come on, it’s no big deal.” “How do you know? You aren’t me.” At the doctor’s office she waited. He reached for his stethoscope, held it to her back and put it away in his pocket. Then, leaning across his desk, he asked importantly, “How long have you been eating your hair?” She couldn’t answer. After surgery they came into the recovery room where she had just wakened. “You are a lucky lady. We found nothing.” She had an incision and several visitors. Besides, she was so lucky (incisions heal) and not a little disgusted. “Me, eating my hair.”

“If it comes to that,” he said, “there’ll be no preventing it.” He uttered it as I listened. Had I got it right, hearing him? “If it comes to that,” is what he said, and, as if talking to himself, went on about how there’d be no preventing it. He came to that conclusion, saying it in a slow way of coming to that, whatever that was it might come to before not being prevented—and as if such a thing were for him the unthinkable, and would prevail, if it came to that. And while listening more closely now to what he said, I realized if no one paid him heed, it would be as if he hadn’t said it—if it came to that—and would then not be prevented from falling to forces known to care little for what he said, even if they heard it, their being wily and forceful enough to make sure it would come to that.

Be perfect, make it otherwise. Yesterday is torn in shreds. Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes Rip apart the breathing beds. Hear bones crack and pulverize. Doom creeps in on rubber treads. Countless overwrought housewives, Minds unraveling like threads, Try lipstick shades to tranquilize Fears of age and general dreads. Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies, Don’t take faucets for fountainheads. Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise You and the werewolf: newlyweds.