Paisley Rekdal

Cut back the stems an inch to keep in bloom. So instructs the florist’s note enclosed inside the flowers. Who knew what was cut could heal again, the green wounds close, stitching themselves together? It doesn’t matter. The flowers, red and white, will bloom awhile, then wither. You sit in an unlit room and watch the vase throw crystal shadows through the dark. The flowers’ colors are so lovely they’re painful. In a week, you’ll have to throw them out. It’s only hope that makes you take out scissors, separate each bloom and cut where you last measured. Did you know Venus was said to turn into a virgin each time she bathed? She did it as a mark of love. She did it so as to please her lovers. Perhaps, overwhelmed by pain, she eventually stopped bathing altogether. It doesn’t matter. It’s a pleasure to feel the green nubs stripped, watch the stems refresh under your blade. They’re here because they’re beautiful. They glow inside your crystal vase. And yet the flowers by themselves are nothing: only a refraction of color that, in a week or two, will be thrown out. Day by day, the water lowers. The red- and-white heads droop, blacken at the stems. It doesn’t matter. Even cut stems heal. But what is the point of pain if it heals? Some things should last forever, instructs the florist’s note.Pleasure, says one god.Shame, says another. Venus heads, they call these flowers. In a week or two, you’ll lose the note, have to call the florist up. With sympathy, you’ll think he says. Perhaps:With love. It doesn’t matter. You’ve stopped bathing. Alone, you sit before the crystal vase refracting you in pieces through the dark. You watch the pale skin bloom inside it, wither. You petal, inch by inch. You turn red and white together.

Quick swim up through my headlights: gold eye a startle in black: green swift glance raking mine. A full second we held each other, then gone. Gone. And how did I know what to call it? Lynx, the only possible reply though I’d never seen one. The car filling with it: moonlight, piñon: a cat’s acrid smell of terror. How quickly the gray body fled, swerving to avoid my light. And how often that sight returns to me, shames me to know how much more this fragment matters. More than the broad back of a man I loved. More than the image of my friend, cancer-struck, curled by her toilet. More than my regret for the child I did not have which I thought once would pierce me, utterly. Nothing beside that dense muscle, faint gold guard hairs stirring the dark. And if I keep these scraps of it, what did it keep of me? A flight, a thunder. A shield of light dropped before the eyes, pinned inside that magnificent skull only time would release. Split back, fade and reveal. Wind would open him. Sun would turn him commonplace: a knot of flies, a rib cage of shredded tendon, wasp-nest fragile. The treasure of him, like anything, gone. Even now, I thumb that face like a coin I cannot spend. If I ever lived, I lived in him, fishing the cold trout-thick streams, waking to snow, dying when he died, which is a comfort. I must say this. Otherwise, I myself do not exist. It looked at me a moment. A flash of green, of gold and white. Then the dark came down again between us. Once, I was afraid of being changed. Now that is done. The lynx has me in its eye. I am already diminished.

I’m here, one fat cherry blossom blooming like a clod, one sad groat glazing, a needle puling thread, so what, so sue me. These days what else to do but leer at any boy with just the right hairline.Hey! I say, That’s one tasty piece of nature. Tart Darkling, if I could I’d gin, I’d bargain, I’d take a little troll this moolit night, let you radish me awhile, let you gag and confound me. How much I’ve struggled with despicing you, always; your false poppets, relentless distances. Yet plea-bargaining and lack of conversation continue to make me your faithful indefile. I’m lonely. I’ve turned all rage to rag, all pratfalls fast to fatfalls for you, My Farmer in the Dwell. So struggle, strife, so strew me, to bell with these clucking mediocrities, these anxieties over such beings thirty, still smitten with this heaven never meant for, never heard from. You’ve said we’re each pockmarked like a golf course with what can’t be said of us, bred in us, isn’t our tasty piece of nature. But I tell you I’ve stars, I’ve true blue depths, have learned to use the loo, the crew, the whole slough of pill-popping devices without you, your intelligent and pitiless graze. Everyone knows love is just a euphemism for you’ve failed me anyway. So screw me. Bartering Yam, regardless of want I’m nothing without scope, hope, nothing without your possibility. So let’s laugh like the thieves we are together, the sieves: you, my janus gate, my Sigmund Fraud, my crawling, crack-crazed street sprawled out, revisible, spell-bound. Hello, joy. I’m thirsty. I’m Pasty Rectum. In your absence I’ve learned to fill myself with starts. Here’s my paters. Here’s my blue. I just wanted to write again and say how much I’ve failed you.

It is important to remember that you will die, lifting the fork with the sheep's brain lovingly speared on it to the mouth: the little piece smooth on the one side as a baby mouse pickled in wine; on the other, blood- plush and intestinal atop its bed of lentils. The lentils were once picked over for stones in the fields of India perhaps, the sun shining into tractor blades slow moving as the swimmer’s arms that pierce, then rise, then pierce again the cold water of this river outside your window called The Heart or The Breast, even, but meaning something more than this, beyond the crudeness of flesh, though what is crude about flesh anyway, watching yourself every day lose another bit of luster? It is wrong to say one kind of beauty replaces another. Isn’t it your heart along with its breast muscles that has started to weaken; solace isn’t possible for every loss, or why else should we clutch, stroke, grasp, love the little powers we once were born with? Perhaps the worst thing in the world would be to live forever. Otherwise, what would be the point of memory, without which we would have nothing to hurt or placate ourselves with later? Look. It is only getting worse from here on out. Thank God. Otherwise the sun on this filthy river could never be as boring or as poignant, the sheep’s brain trembling on the fork wouldn’t seem once stung by the tang of grass, by the call of some body distant and beloved to it still singing through the milk. The fork would be only a fork, and not the cool heft of it between your fingers, the scratch of lemon in the lentils, onions, parsley slick with blood; food that, even as you lift it to your mouth, you never thought you’d eat. And do.

And the black water under the boats with their pools of bilge rainbowed out like rinds of steak fat, the salt thick in my nostrils, but pleasant, too: details I still remember from Bishop’s poem, everything else about it lost. At the docks, I watched my friend slip in her rubber boots; the wide, wet planks glossy with mosses. You must walk duckfooted to get to the boats, the black and orange fishing barrels, the air with its tang of rusted metals. There are always hooks and anchors to be found, nets and scrapings of wood planed by chisel, the way my great-grandmother was said to have worked, employed as a shipwright on the city’s waterways in the ’30s according to the newspaper clipping my grandmother photocopies for me each Christmas. The description of her gunmetal hair and slim torso clad in overalls, the hands she held out for the Times reporter (“Callused,” he noted, “strong as a man’s”) does not recall the woman I remember for her farm in Bothell before it became a Seattle suburb, helping me gather raspberries from the long canes she planted by her porch. We spent an afternoon together sweating in the same long-sleeved checkered shirts she’d sewn us, according to the photo I no longer have, and cannot remember whether is the source or confirmation of this memory: only the papery, gray-green streaks of road dust on the canes, a bowl of chipped porcelain inside of which were raspberries. Very red, very sweet, furred like my friend’s upper lip I remember between my teeth as we stood on the docks. The smell of iron and winter mist, her mouth like nothing I have tasted since.

My eye climbs a row of spoilers soldered into ailerons, cracked bay doors haphazarded into windows where every rivet bleeds contrails of rust. An hour ago, the doctor’s wand waved across my chest and I watched blood on a small screen get back-sucked into my weakened heart. It’s grown a hole I have to monitor: one torn flap shuddering an infinite ellipsis of gray stars back and forth.You’re the writer, the doctor said in French.Tell me what you see. Easier to stand in a courtyard full of tourists scrying shapes from this titanic Rorschach. Here’s a pump stub shaped like a hand; something celled, cavernously fluted as a lobster’s abdomen. How much work it must have taken to drag these bits out of pits of flame, from lake beds and rice paddies, and stack them in layers: the French planes heaped beneath the American ones, while the Englishwoman beside me peers into this mess of metals, trying to isolate one image from the rest. Ski boot buckle or tire pump, she muses at me, fossilized shark’s jaw, clothespin, wasp’s nest? According to the camera, it’s just a picture changing with each angle, relic turned to rib cage, chrome flesh to animal: all the mortal details enumerated, neutered. I watch her trace an aluminum sheet torched across a thruster as if wind had tossed a silk scarf over a face. If she pulled it back, would I find a body foreign as my own entombed in here, a thousand dog tags jangling in the dark? I tilt my head: the vision slides once more past me, each plane reassembling then breaking apart. Spikes of grief— or is it fury?—throb across the surface. Everything has a rip in it, a hole, a tear, the dim sounds of something struggling to pry open death’s cracked fuselage. White sparks, iron trails. My heart rustles in its manila folder. How the doctor smiled at the images I fed him:A row of trees, I said, pointing at my chart.Stone towers, a flock of backlit swallows— Now I kneel beside a cross of blades on which the Englishwoman tries to focus.Do you think I’ll get it all in the shot? she calls as she steps back. Steps back and back. Something like a knife sheath. Something like a saint’s skull. The sky floats past, horizon sucked into it. She won’t.