Brightening
Rita Dove
Space, this implosion—like a word
with its walls giving way.
—Breyten Breytenbach
[Mise en Scene.]
- Which face to choose?
Start in the left-hand corner—and speak to it
as if to a flock of birds
deserting men in their famished quarters.
Like doodling, the idea,
the need, is to have a beautiful shape,
a skull that cups the hand . . .
Or start with shoes. In boxes, in graves,
the left one only;
one at a time the flowered sandals of children.
Or hands, severed, with the wrist hairs
lightly bristling.
Or simply nail the box shut and
the hand is inside
automatically.
- (You cannot speak to hands;
you touch them.
Shoes, you crowd out.)
swings bad at vespers.
Winter opens the air. Each banal instruction
—Go to the end of the line
and wait till I count to ten—
is clear, a knife in water—below,
the playground's bitter primary colors,
bright tubes and slides.
The children's voices
grow shriller, filling
the spaces between branches
in the abandoned acacia . . .
and you feel
you could speak to them,
that they would even understand
the language of birds.
-
[But they ignore you.
They pour across the concrete like pestilence,
coiled mufflers unpeeled in a wink,
although it will be weeks before
the windows begin to drip,
lose their waxen resignation.]
their cries are sharper.
*
- Start with the face before morning.
Kissed off. Crisscrossed with sleep.
Lids puffed with dreams.
The plum lip cheesy in corners.
- (This is how we come to ourselves:
first the splash
then the body,
the first gulp of coffee
straightening us into humanity)
I have grown wings.
By way of the Trail of Tears
I have turned pale overnight.
By way of sale of a twelve-year-old in marriage to pay a drinking debt
I came along: medium tall, medium dark.
The face I put on mornings:
smudged orchid petal, crème de cacao,
fragrant dust.
Fingernails gilded, heraldic.
Everything by design.
*
- I want only the paint:
swirled ridges, crusts of pigment
curling off the lip of the knife.
I want my life to be
the story of paint, concrete color:
a flying fish so orange, it's a medallion
cast into ashes. Now I will stop biting
my cuticles and my back will stop aching
so I can paint until the sun comes up;
then I'll take a cup of sherry to bed
to calm down. I want to lick the canvas,
grow buoyant on turpentine, make love
to every year between eighteen and twenty-five
and paint each in its own color—
reddening branch, emerald caduceus of leaves
traveling fast over the garden wall.
I want the cerise of the poisoned berry
and the blue eel and the gray of the pebble
you must moisten with your tongue
to bring out its platinum sheen.
I want you to be that pebble.
I want to put you in my mouth.
*
- I know the silence behind a smile,
the milky introductions, friendships of embarrassment
that exhaust the mind: I mean the mind
either slithers to a stop or veers
toward violins and cocoa.
This is the way of the managerial universe.
I know how to walk there, sweep into a dimlit room
and locate the hubs of power before
my coat has been taken.
Ah, rectitude.
There is something to be said for a flaking croissant,
the contentment of fresh preserves and the correct
temperature of café au lait. Such happiness
lasts longer than most pleasures.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal said, How we feel
is how we want to be heard. I wish
I had said that. I wish I could say that, now.
*
- Step onto the ancient veldt:
kicked-up dust teasing the nostrils
with a gingery whiff of drought.
The melancholic call of the blue-crowned Trogon
who sings only when she sits on her nest.
Is this what's meant by the sublime—
a skimming that shakes the soul to its depths,
a mesh of elegant solitudes?
Everywhere, the invisible.
Is it sweat or a tear which explodes,
darkens my walking shoe's filigree imprint?
But there's no skill to memory: Cry out
and Echo answers.
