Robin Ekiss

The question of my mother is on the table. The dark box of her mind is also there, the garden of everywhere we used to walk together. Among the things the body doesn't know, it is the dark box I return to most: fallopian city engrained in memory, ghost-orchid egg in the arboretum, hinged lid forever bending back and forth — open to me, then closed like the petals of the paperwhite narcissus. What would it take to make a city in me? Dark arterial streets, neglected ovary hard as an acorn hidden in its dark box on the table: Mother, I am out of my mind, spilling everywhere.

I was raised in the company of dolls. My mother, the miniaturist, made pies the size of thumbnails. My father, the shadowboxer, talked only to the dark. No one here remembers the love of a chair for its ottoman or the privacy of a shut door. Windows grieve in their sashes. They burn with interior light, like blood oranges. Imagine: a dollhouse in every room— in every room, another room, in every girl, another girl looking out a tiny window, her face repeated on the glass. As two who could not pretend to love each other, we stared through grief. Pupil,poupée, little doll orphaned by the iris of my eye: what did you see, what did you see but that other girl in me, the door to whose post was nailed the smallest coffin, hiding the name of God inside like the rust in the mouth.

The pleasure of contrast: not chained up in an oilcoth sack underwater, holding his breath, but composing himself for the camera, in his only suit. You have to understand photography— unforgiving mirror, unlike oils that soften the hard edges of a man’s face if you want them to, or velvet curtain shielding the pine box during an escape. The audience imagines his bones contracting to a splinter. That’s not at all how it’s done— the camera’s lens blanketed by cloth to keep it in the dark; any halo of light ruptures the film with shadow. His eyes already turn inward to that place we’re going. She thinks about escape too: at the horse butcher, in line like the others, or arguing over the price of bread at the Market of Innocents. Adam’s rib is forever hidden inside her chest as the force of blows hibernates in a boxer’s fist, but she, at least, is smiling when he says, We have such a small family, meaning your body won’t open to me—it’s shackled inside its cage: love and rage, whose bars are meant to be broken.

Of the face in general, let me say it’s a house built by men and lived in by their dreams. When you’ve been plucking eyes out of the floorboards as long as I have, you’ll see this, just as you’d see the patience it requires to render an eyebrown, half an hour and an understanding of architecture. When you see your body, think its opposite: not the bridge, but its lighted face reflecting the water, some other city as seen from a ship— your forehead, once ponderous, now light as umbrellas— still not beautiful enough to make time stop. The pleasure in being a woman’s knowing everything’s borrowed and can’t be denied, as when you take apart a clock, there’s always another inside.

Thomas Edison loved a doll with a tiny phonograph inside because he made her speak. Is there any other reason to love a woman? Did she say the ghost of my conception or something equally demure? It’s hard to be sure how he feels when he holds me, I fall apart. I’m projecting here. He didn’t feel her first transgression was in having no expression. René Descartes, too, traveled alone with a doll-in-a-box he called his daughter.Francine, Francine... is it better to be silent and wait for everything we were promised? Or should we love them back, the way a train loves its destination, as if we have the machinery necessary for it?

A car’s backfire rifles the ear with skeleton clatter, the crowd’s walla walla draws near, caterwaul evaporating in thin air. Silence is dead. (Long live silence.) Let’s observe a moment of it, call it what it’s not: splatter of rain that can’t soothe the window’s pane, dog barking up the wrong tree. Which tree, which air apparent is there to hear a word at its worth? Hammer that drums its water-logged warning against the side of the submarine: I’m buried to the hilt like the knife, after it’s thrown, continues to bow to the apple it’s split.

i. Not to go backward, not to watch the women peddling in reverse past the church, the priest in his black habit receding from the chapel door. Not to go backward, the bones of August becoming the bones of March, branch of dogwood picked clean by frost. Not to say Yes when asked the question all women wait to hear, Are you anything like your mother?