‘Rose red, in many variations of shade, dark in the hollows, lighter at the edges, softly granulated, with irregular clots of blood, open as a surface mine to the daylight. . . Poor boy, you were past helping. I had discovered your great wound; this blossom in your side was destroying you.’
– Franz Kafka, A Country Doctor (1917)
Ever since I was a little girl
I’ve always wanted to yell, ‘My leg!
My leg!’ after a great accident.
In this fantasy I am myself
but also an old man in a golfing costume
walking alone down a country road –
distracted by the slightly annoying and toxic
first green of spring, eyes overflowing
with the high-pitched, adolescent hum
that oft accompanies my idleness –
when a large branch topples down on me.
Before this happens I am thinking of you,
so in a sense you are the true accident.
‘Crushed again!’ I moan to no one
down in the dirt
where I have always belonged.
The ditch, she comforts me,
her pocked surface a trove for sight.
Den mother for lichens, moss,
recesses in which frightened beetles
may withdraw from the day.
In our shared madness
the ditch and I
we stare together
deep into my wound.
I will describe it for you:
French Bible painted white
in which a slit is laser cut
down through the pages, almost to Job.
Smoked salmon inlaid
with bits of gravel.
Neoclassical detail
of a crumpled garment
left after a feast.
Maquette for a later work
done hastily in wine-colored Plastilina.
The red lace border acts
as a quasi shore.
The tilting mechanism
underneath the irregular bowl
of chrysanthemum bitters
and rank electrolytes
reveals and conceals
a partially hidden core
of fossilized mammoth ivory.
The drawer overflows with wet scarves.
Giclée print of stabbed Victorian
overstuffed chair. Raspberry sorbet
replaces the body
of the oyster.
Flipping through wallpaper swatches
you find your sister’s mouth
breathing up at you. She spits
up the retainer you lost
on a school trip in 8th grade
down a museum’s elevator shaft.
A screensaver in a dark room.
A mirror that reflects the room
without you in it. A chewing gum
vase. A song about falling
plays as you fall.
The deep, perfumed hole
lined with feathered rags
that has been forming
in the middle of 3rd Avenue
for some time now.
A hot little flower.
The faces of my bored students
during a screening
of Chantal Akerman’s
La Chambre produce a hurt
in me not unlike this one.
Will you cup it in your mind?
Give her a little blow?
You’ll be happy to know
that in this piece we are confronted
with the artist’s struggle
to work inside limiting
yet often exhilarating
boundaries of femininity
as they relate to time,
duration, and landscapes
of the domestic interior.
And that’s really something.
I guess the thing is,
I would like an apology
for the last time we lay together.
The way you touched me in a hurry.
I am looking out the window
at a handsome roofer
climbing a ladder. This rubber baby
purchased online from Idaho,
she arrived in tissue.
She cries real tears.
Image © enneafive
