Rebecca Morgan Frank

In the next room, Peter’s gloved hands crack cordoned-off spines: he has been granted permission, his agent’s call his pedigree. So the tour itself is only the docent and me. He is docile, eager to please, leads me up the stairs and takes me to the bed. The coverlet is authentic, he says. He lectures me on the heating system, offers an anecdote of a broken casserole, recites all of the Welty lore he has rehearsed. She taught him when he was young, and now he serves her legend, lets me lean in toward the books—I cross the line of what’s allowed, never touching. He shows me photos—two loves lost, one a married man—then on the way down, pauses before a feather in a box, reciting Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” He begins to weep at Let her drop, adds, Like Welty’s loves! Now I stop— is he comparing her to the god, or Leda? He cannot bear her, her Unfulfilled Love. I cannot bear this either—how dare he conjure up for her such disappointment, such wasted longing? I want to be the mirror of her photographs, to be her figure of my own conjuring. I want to believe I, too, could be happy here, in this solitary house, in this small town, amidst the rows and stacks of books. Untouched.

When you asked if it rained bees or poison you were asking the wrong question. Again. You still didn’t understand the difference between hurricanes and flooding. Thus between gods and humans. Between your slum- lordy digs and the shacks I pass that cling to old boards and huddle around each family. The yards marking the care of home. Everywhere something is falling on someone and I watch like an autumn tourist tripping through the Berkshires. I reach to catch a leaf. I try to straighten a Pisa-like sapling. The wind wraps around us both like a question mark and leaves me standing, the sole witness on this end. I’m telling you about a place of silence. You want it all to be a metaphor. I’m watching a front porch crumble. Still, someone sits there.

I held a jackhammer once. It matched me in height and weight and I planned destruction, ripped everything solid from the ground. The concrete was my prey, but it was the tool I fought to master, its metal body trembling beneath my hands. Or, perhaps, its electric heart was what shook me through my last held bones. The concrete, gone, the rented machinery, returned— and I wondered if Sisyphus had imagined a garden where the rock came from.

When you walked in it was like recognizing the moon when he returns. His lover bites his cheek; she has no choice. All we see is the dissolution, then await the reconstruction. Each time, the sky yanks her into his orbit. I want to say I’m sorry. I want to say You win.Our bodies are like the confessional booth these poems are stuck in. Even the priest can see that sin. You’ll be all spit and honey— or maybe I’m the poisoned flower gnawing on its own lip because it has no hands to reach for you. Only words that are as useless as the pollen for saying anything. I continue to serve them even with your hands around my throat from across the room. Your voice is home, I answer it like a bat guided across the atmosphere. This is a narrative that cannot end well but wants to, but must. I’ll continue to go down kicking and you’ll be sweet as anything until you bite back. No, it can’t end here—we won’t let it. Billions of years have passed since an asteroid last hit the moon: clearly some magnetic fields can be sustained.

title after Robert Clermont Witt, 1906 Refuse to make eye contact with the subject. He has been following you around the gallery. You are certain that he can see down your shirt. Look at other subjects, but know that they, too, are not of primary interest. Even when they watch you. Try not to consider what happened to the small girl staring furiously, the thin-faced woman wanly looking away. Do not think about what they had for breakfast, if the bread was hard. Certainly do not consider the odors underneath their arms and skirts. Do not allow a breeze into the room they sit in. Do not assume I am talking about any painting: step away from the subject. All subject. Was the painter in love? Do not ask the question. Imagine you are the painter, blocking out everything you don’t want to see. Everything is out of the picture. Stop looking. Stop seeking what isn’t there. Tuck your narratives back in your pocket. Look for perspective, light, shade. Let your eyes wander back to the girl. She is trying to say something but her mouth has been painted deliberately shut. Her lips, thin.

Everyone in the room is cheering. This is what you do for a painting you love! We climb up on one another’s shoulders, wave pom-poms that match the palette. We want to buy the season tickets to the train that huffs through this landscape. We want to climb the towers of this steely sculpture and hang the flag. Victory is ours! We have seen something to love here. Outside the gallery, there is an alley full of garbage. Beauty stops at the door. A scraggly tree is coming out of the pavement where the people are lined up, cigarettes and cell phones, waiting for a chance to look. They keep their giant fingers in their bags. Wear T-shirts of their favorite teams of artist assistants. On the alley wall, someone has drawn a hillside and a horse. A young man sits on a crate and peels the glue from under his nails. He nods. And looks. And soon, pulls out the chalk and adds a saddle and a man, who looks back and shouts as if he has found his enemy again.

My first teacher told me that what sculpture involved was being a God. He was not talking about the old ways, about fashioning a man out of a rib. Out of the earth. A god can see something that does not exist yet in the world. Who could have imagined the giraffe, the octopus, the flounder? Who could have imagined our sharp sensibilities, our contortions? The materials are all there—eyes and blood and respiration, but still, they get made new. Now I know that these days such a view is against science, but the idea of a god is as real as god is not. A scientist who sees what has been done versus one who can make straw out of gold. Or more like plastic out of petroleum. Paper out of trees. You have to decide which kind you will be. We’re mistaken when we equate the wise and the prophetic. You’re always looking either backwards or forwards. This piece puts you on a precipice. It’s up to you which way you fall. You see—it’s all there. The scientist and the artist were once one— how else could you record what you saw? How else, find a way of seeing?

I’ve always felt as if I were in a cage. If I stick out an arm, I’m seen as wanting and taking. A leg: my violence is noted. When I mentioned the suffocation by my father, they made it autobiographical. The subtext of my work in iron has been ignored, lost in discussions of time, not space. What you’ll never understand about installations is that everyone else is always outside of them. I’m stuck inside. The move toward deliberate transience is the mark of a fool. If disappearing is inevitable, you must fight it. No one misses the prisoner. The bars are like a frame: you want in as much as I have always wanted out.