UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:______

I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:

It is entitled:

This work and its defense approved by:

Chair: ______

Teatime in Heaven with the Crazy Ladies

A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences by Ariana-Sophia M. Kartsonis November 17, 2008 Bachelor of Arts, University of Utah 1994 Master of Fine Arts, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 2000 Doctor of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati ABSTRACT: Teatime in Heaven with the Crazy Ladies

Like bees caught in the wrong hive, we are the circle of crazy ladies. Anne Sexton

This project is a series of poems written from the perspectives of Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Edna St.Vincent Millay, Anne Sexton and Virginia Woolf, who discuss their deaths, lives, loves, works and the words written about them both during their lives in the imagined space and time of a "coffeetable in the afterlife." The collection employs conventions from formal poetry, free verse and prose. Some of the borrowed cadences and "scaffolding" of those forms and the obsessive nature of the repetitions within some will serve to highlight the common thread of mental illness. Poetic forms lend a kind of order to the chaos of art, but also they add deliberate reverberations that echo the hauntings of those suffering from mental illness. My examination of the poetry of Medbh McGuckian as the critical component of this project deals with the difficult aesthetics of her work and its relationship and perceived responsibility to the politics of being a woman writer in Northern Ireland.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank: Red Booth Review, Issue 9 for the publication of “For a Man Overheard Mentioning a Fondness for the Word Darling” as well as The University of Cincinnati and The Academy of American Poets for awarding first prize to “Handsome this Day No Matter Who Has Died: Elegy for the Polaroid Instamatic”

Beyond that, there is no way to sufficiently thank the people within my program and my life without whom this degree and so much else would prove impossible. In a meager attempt, I would like to thank my family whose support was never so necessary and so vast as it has proven to be over these few years. I am lucky to have the best parents imaginable and in them to have constant friendship and love. Thank you. My sister, Tonia, for her large heart and grand enthusiasm for my writing. I am lucky to call you sister. Christina for making me laugh and helping me feel the kin in kindred and kindness.

At various times my committee has been friend, mentor, tireless editor and cheerleader and at every turn, deeply appreciated. Specifically, thanks to Jana Braziel for encouragement, warmth and that wild, gorgeous hair and mind. Thank you to John Drury for classes that I could not wait to attend for all that was found there. Thanks too, for support, calming notes and being so brilliant it was easy to read by you. To Don Bogen for that humble stone-by- stone patience, a vast aesthetic and the care taken to help me be a better writer and with any luck, a better teacher by example. To Jim Cummins for profound friendship. Thank you to all of you for your words: poetry and prose and for how much they matter. You are the teachers I could only hope to be when (and if) I grow up. In infinite and eternal gratitude.

Thank you to Lisa at Sitwell’s Coffee Shop on Ludlow Avenue. You have made a rare and dying breed of business that keeps people fed and warm. So much editing happened within those vibrant walls. I lived in a village and it was divine. You are all deeply- missed.

To Caleb Adler, a wonderful writer and my best friend. In so many ways this book is yours. My time in Cincinnati was filled with laughter and the great security of feeling cared-for and the happiness of knowing that you live! You live!

Although the black cat (miracle on four velvet paws) refers to a cat named Gladys as an imaginary cat of Sexton’s, this book was also influenced by Drusilla DeVille Adler and the joy she brought on May 20, 2006 to Middleton Avenue. For my little Cincinnati family Caleb and Dru, these words owe their breath to you. TABLE SET FOR TEATIME

White-Flesh Nectarine 1 Pawnshop of the Heart 2 Teatime in Heaven, Listening in 5 Looking Our Dead in the Eye 6 The Flip Side of the Moon 7 Our Dead Eye Us From Across the Room 8 Virginia Describes 9 Fingerprinting the Sky 11 Like Hummingbirds, the Dead Drink… 12 Putting the Me in Melancholy 13 Zelda Addresses the Feminists 16 Zelda Addresses the Literati 18 Among the Mattresses of the Dead 19 Bless You, Bless You 20 Among the Mattresses, After All 21 Paradisiacal 22 The Dead Live Like a Sun Ensnared… 23 Interpretations of the Rorschach Blots… 24 What Our Dead Think About… 25 The Teatime Girls Serenade Vincent 26 Gone the Way of the Honeybees… 27 And How Many Skies Exhaled 28 Eaves 29 Poem Wishing to Lodge in the Roof… 31 Assia Recalls 32 Assia Composes 33 Handsome This Day… 34 Assia Ponders… 36 Riverine, Waterglass… 38 A Given Day 39 For a Man Overheard Once… 42 Silver Key: Anne Writes a Note… 43 A Happened Balloon 44 In the Art Gallery of After… 45 Dear Doctor 46 Any Livable Fall 47 Attenuation 50 Let the Figure Be a Child 51 Only Paradise 52

Drawing Lines: Medbh McGuckian as Trap-Setter and Puzzle-Maker 53 Notes 73

1

White-Flesh Nectarine

The beautiful weather is not your problem; the stanza of birds on rows of wire isn’t mine.

On the west side you’ll find the house from the photograph. She was one there and two, she was five, six and seven.

Out front three trees were planted for three daughters, someone’s chopped them down. Drive by now and you’ll see no sign of her mother’s depression, her father’s apron that smelled faintly of onions and meat, oregano and their terrible, pretty hope. That serious child in the wool coat walked away long ago and the tree stumps that she watered every day for years never re-grew.

And you were wrong, you were wrong. The house will too sweep itself. 2

Pawnshop of the Heart --and still we long to feel Jeanette Winterson

Don’t come here looking for sadnessi though she looks for sadness in every here she drives through, every here she calls home.

The year the Madonna image appears on the high-rise in Florida Elaina leaves for good: her hands full of last minutes.

She wakes to a morning so rich—it’s decadent. “Of course there are drugs to short circuit the sorrow, to soften the blow,” she hears from the radio.

But Elaina believes in sadness: the empty hangers chiming in the hall closet, the tired dresses thrown over the door; and in a night where lovers remain hinged after lovemaking, stay connected to sleep as linked puzzle pieces, perchance to dream the same weary dreams.

Elaina knows how hard it is to still the mice living beneath the long curved staircase of one body, to clear the cobwebs from the soul’s corner. How hard to watch the dust gather in the tired pawnshop of the heart with its tuneless ukuleles, wedding bands, heavy binoculars and too many guns.

(It’s enough to lie down beside a body and trust that much.)

Given that a hand can’t return from the pore-knowledge of flesh. Given how little one body can ask of another. Given the tireless auctioneer of wonder going, going, gone, the thriftshops of bliss, donation bins for elation. Given how much is given and given away.

3

Elaina wants to open up the body beside her in the dark, ask of it impossible things: the tuft of herself hidden away in the prayer-dark organ words: spleen, pancreas, liver, lover-heart.

She’d like to whisper secrets to the sacred kneecap, the left elbow, the shapely-kidney, the belly-beloved. I write you. I ache you. I crave you. I sad you. I trouble you to stay troubled long enough to feel a thing or two.

Tonight, Mary’s gleaming and Elaina’s heart shimmers back. Even her pain is nostalgic: a smell from a far-away room. She wants one place to keep everything: a pop-up book of her cities, her lighthouse, her loves, a wing inside her big enough to hold even the tall building stained with radiant Mary and a constant throng of faithful with their candles, incense cones, their hissed prayers. The stormcloud inside her shaped like two arms grabs for everything and comes back empty-handed.

But tonight it passes over her home so that even the ballad on the radio plays reminiscent of sorrow--someone else’s dealable grief Standing over the city, she wants to kiss each square window of light, make all the little parts in the world whole again.

Elaina dreams her mother’s dark-eyed dreams and swears that somewhere a house remembers the soles of her feet marring the carpet. The furniture breathes a history in a house she never lived in but flies over just the same and calls it her own.

Somewhere across town a man is falling to memory, a woman is falling to bits, and rain is drenching the city, dousing the lights and washing clean the backs and shoulders of buildings.

Further south, the Virgin Mary shines iridescent on the glass pane of a tall building. People bring flowers, begin shrines, scientists offer reasons and Windex 4 to the bright-eyed believers who just want to keep believing. At night, she waits for the shattering, the rock, the sharp aim. But for now, on a building in Florida, she’s dazzling, she’s Mary, Mary, mother to miracles of glass. Elaina shines with her, shines for momentary icons, glaring saints, dealers in fragile, fragile faiths all.

5

Teatime in Heaven: Listening In

It was the cold air leaking through the window’s cracks, some late-in-the day weather that made her think of heaven’s porthole and her grandmother standing on the dirt floors and stirring the morning crema before sprinkling cinnamon on the skin that forms goatsmilk-rich on the surface of it. It was the cold air leaking through the glass and Elaina’s mind set to raising the imaginary sash between here and there. Here with the living: Elaina and there where they gathered:Virginia, Emily, Vincent, Sylvia, Anne, Zelda, sometimes crossing paths with the grandmothers as one entered Earth, the other left: they were like leaves caught papery, five-fingered, twisting, twisted in the vestibule of her mind. Learned, like her one grandmother, ill like the other, their visions particular and peculiar. It was Emily first who could not stop for death but found it gracious, accommodating: elegant reaper: all meter and rhyme.

One grandmother psychotic and one stopped in time in Greece: kitchened and cooking for the other angry grandfather where she taught school and said never hang your basket higher than you can reach which made Elaina long for elevation, some place paradise-high and filmy where she might press a glass to the sky, an ear to the glass and listen as they gave-in, gave-up the various ghosts and found if not, heaven, then a place for girls gone dizzy with words to set out from that spin, to win a little peace: a teatime for the weary and the too-wise.

6

Looking Our Dead in the Eye

The un-risen dough of days.

Yes the tree’s a blown fuse, the sky’s eyes are olivine, the hillside warps in the distance between.

Loaves of mountain, the oil of ravine. We grow basil for each other. We learn to run outdoors.

The horizon’s grimace at the village shifts. Houses dovetail the sky.

When we say dusk we mean departure and when we say departure we mean far light’s last breath. So then, a star disrobes, someone writes crepuscule but intends crepe-paper clouds and yesterday a pail of rainwater, a pail of port-holed sky. Heaven cut from the stenciled base of a water glass.

In that last light everything shakes in its casing. The dead see the soil as nightsky glinting with tiny minerals above and below, the world is rich. 7

The Flip Side of the Moon Where Dead Moths, Star-husks & Lunatics Gather

The dull stars we hold now were glowing. In this mad wing of heaven, we know someone will go on going on, going gone, then still going out like a breath: cloud-shaped to slow. The cold stars we wished on unknowing.

Something is ripe for sowing though fruitless and bellowing low. Someone will go on going through the motions of some awful rowing toward a cracked sky long after we know the coalstars to guide us stop glowing.

Sometimes we just watch the ongoing ennui of the auction below. On-we-go, in this shared undergoing.

Going once, going twice, always owing, that ribcage of sky just to hear the moon low, towards the done-stars we hang from unknowing, while somebody goes on going.

8

Our Dead Eye Us from Across the Room

Roots tangle into ribs to tell the secrets of tangerines ahum with their orangeness, the honey glass-golden. The night the dead greeted us at the curb, we hid our car keys and our hearts in the high grass of bedrooms. We draped our souls across the river and walked stone by stone to the other side of them. Our hands made silhouettes of hands shaped like star-shaped leaves off the branches of the denuded maple. Our hands—five-fingered foliage, were all the tree could ever ask for of leaving.

They want water. Fingers lax like they’ve dropped something. A hat hid beneath our skirts We were barely across the season and we fled.

Do we think we’re beautiful when we beg? We are one thing and it’s thirsty.

9

Virginia Describes

I’m not anywhere you'd call in breathy alliteration and flames nor bolt of white silk and I remain nothing's opposite touched by crazed light. By crazed--I mean hairline-cracks webbing my glaze. By crazed I mean touched.

Long before, I was violated by love’s bad reflection against a looking glass in a dining hall where a half-brother's half-man, half-beast hands explored my own private underworld.

But enough of there. The air here is half-hearted heat and damp, tastes dust off old living rooms where the living collect their mute matter and shed flesh. Embroidered on ribbons of scenery and idle on the outskirts of agony and yet, I’m back to there again when I mean to describe it here with its unrelenting serenities.

The birds still speak Greek to me but there is no trouble in that, no terrible--just words where their songs would have been. Thaktylithi, thaktylithi, thaktylithi, They refer to the bullseye core of a tree trunk, the signatures on the tip of each finger as if fingers were stone and a snail fossilized against them.

What spirals out asks for always, what spirals in asks for crucial brevity, what spirals in, My Love, meant life to me. What life meant to me I could neither abide nor reside in. But death’s endless corridors are also largely unlivable and eternity flattens out desire.

So much time thrown out over a forever-and-always sky. Here, in a place I refuse to call heaven--without time killing us we’re truly killing time. But it never dies.

Here’s the good news and the bad: the afterlife is you Sweet Sisters, all you in a way that life never was, but you left too long in a bone china cup. Too strong and watery at once. We heard the whistle scream a long time before we were inclined to turn down the fire. By then it's all scorched: burnt water--the whir of it pooling in your ears.

New women arrive every day --fresh from the living world (its endless and numerous deaths) and ripe for a final continuous dying. What there are you here from? We ask. What there brings you here?

A long-suffering man waved me off. But my truest love bore my own shape and a name that meant life to me so well it kept me pinned to hopeless Earth a beat or two too long.

10

Beyond that, there's little to look back for. Love there was flawed love always reaching for more. We meant well but someone was always failing it.

Stones in my pocket. Pine in my heart. All that everness. I was loved and loved. 11

Fingerprinting the Sky

What day leans into Saturn? Ours. Haloed and sorry-rung. What spirals out concentrically and in again: the cochlear timelessness of voices. Grecian birds thinking in Hebrew. Ripples gone out over our pricked finger brambles. Prints interrupted in their whirling out tellings. How dear to be this thorn pilgriming the rosebud of finger—to pause circlings from the first telling bone to blood to skin the funnel cloud brewing on the ends of our hands, then delicate: our spirits tell themselves to the surface. We cannot leave ourselves behind thoroughly enough. The finger’s greasy kiss begins it: residue but incomplete. No longer us, we follow them out as they radiate away. No sunbeam inside us we take gentle inside that body and leave notes to the world where we’ve been. Angelic coroners of our own smoldering coronation. So pale. So charred. We are smudges on the shine--how else to have lived? Dusted-over. Read by the patterns our touches: all autograph. No way of escaping that. Our souls kite-caught in the wrong tree. Forgive me Leonard. Forgive me.

12

Like Hummingbirds, The Dead Drink Light from the Trumpet Flowers of July

Orange vine, orange sky, the dead are dying to be sung. Hymnals and hyacinth they drink to birds and the nectar of what we’ve loved. We’ve loved these afternoons like small theaters each of us searching the other out in the dark which is something like the dead-dark: tombed and so private but then again, no. This dark so lively this dark hung with the dead of night secrets and the never-be-dead molecules shaking in their thin overcoats.

We emerge from the trumpet-flowers like ants, drunk from those close quarters.

13

Putting the Me in Melancholy

She lived in a house where judges live, where debutantes and premiere flappers and girls named lavishly for the Gypsy girls they’d never have to be combed their mirror-shiny un-wild hair before vanities and bureaus, furniture too cumbersome to carry in a Gypsy wagon or on a Gypsy back. Only we took in that wanderlust, we who lived the other life, who whispered in that sweet-smelling soft-skinned ear with a lobe of gardenia petal, its curve the dainty scripted signature of comfortable residents.

They lived on a block where the largest magnolias stood like stout socialites awaiting the first strains of song at the cotillion. They lived well-heeled and well-known. They lived in big ballrooms and social pages. In the never-betweens. We lived in a soggy little house between the river and the train station. Quiet was caught between the barge's throaty holler and the train moaning about something dreadful. We were held there: us and silence, crosspinned like bugs between departures and the something-even-worse that followed. We were, I mean, held there. That river. That quiet. Something cottony to the light there a bloated kind of light— without temperature. Years happened on that water. They sparkled and they sunk in it. We floated that way—could have kept at it I guess. I mean we might have tried. (Not that they weren’t trying years.) Years. But they weren’t what came next. Moonstab and trainbellow and then her again, and then us.

Mississippi smelled sometimes like green apple laundry. It was summer, she was something resembling well then and greenapplelaundryair was a normal, quiet thing to say. Then later when Alabama begged, wore silk dresses that came apart like a girl before a dance. Onto moonstab at riverhide and her cry again and then ours. We sent a body down the river of her and that boy came down all swaddled like a mummy-Jesus, that boy came through the town of her, down the river like a corkboy--not a dead, bedraggled drowned boy floating that way all the way down from Minnesota, someone said, 14

with portholes of sky stuck on his open, staring eyes. Dinnerplates of sky on his white deadboy eyes. Then all of Montgomery spoke saying “our daughter tripped and fell. Our daughter’s words and brain and life tripped and fell.”

Saying “I blame that boy with heaven served up on his cheap dish eyes.” From where he stared up he might’ve told us things: the moon isn’t kind, for one. The fanged stars: their light a stabbing thing, the high points of barbed wire.

Dead eyes or no, when this boy saw he saw through. Just like the magician, his assistant. The boy could saw a body clear through. A mind too. Ask us, go ahead. Ask us about that drenched boy and a touched girl. Saturated with what that boy, that damned boy saw and passed on.

“Our daughter’s not crazy. She’s right to fear the heavens. Malice moonlight & sharp-toothed stars. Right as rain she is to know as much.”

Blame us, the body we dropped into her body, the body we sent downstream from sanity, downstream. Blame that drowned boy whispering our dream-whispers into her head. From his river bed he might’ve warned her, how the moon isn’t kind, for one. The moon is no kind of light fixture. The moon’s kind isn’t our kind isn’t now and won’t be.

I’m saying skies were spinning plates on his dumb deadboy eyes. And we stood in the forest, we scripted his lines and she heard us, looked up to us, but no one else was attuned. She heard voices asking: Why bother with the living? Why crazy them this way? When it hurts we return to the banks of certain riversii. We return to the certain riverboy dead-sure in the way we’ll never be. We return to the banks of certain moments, we try to throw back a shot of that-one-day-when… but we can’t keep it down. When it hurts we return to the boy who hears the radio too, the hurt songs, the rivering boys and the dead-eyed girls glazed from it all. When it hurts we return to that station, tune in and the raw truth of it is worth the hurting. We know then what the river knows, silt-said and rubbed-raw, what the moon says, the sky too, and those little crooked stars, jagged things, we have their number too, and we call them up on the telephone of the cosmos, and we listen up when they tell us what they know. I’m saying our girl’s not crazy, she’s just over-tuned in. 15

Listen up, there were skyblue saucers of sky lighting on his creepy deadboy eyes and that kind of looking starts moonsingings: Take me down to the water. Take me down to where rivers swallow boys down whole like a baby aspirin. Spit them back up too smooth for the innocent girls living in the little town hemming the water in and the girls there in those little towns are willing to listen to the spooky songs of the dead boys --smoother now than before--trickling crazysong into a daughter’s ear. Tumbles them smooth. That polished boy striking our girl right smack in the eyes with his high, high shine, striking her soul like a gong or a high-hat cymbal and that shaking—shook and shine—hangs in the air like some holy caravan of ghost. It’s lonely, her ashes dance in lightbeams of the sixth story of the atmosphere where a madhouse used to be but some nights, when her hair catches in memory, in southern magnolia and the last squashed petals make lotion on the ground, Zelda falls back and she knows the boy’s knowing, not drowning but waving to where a preacher walks a day down to the water and baptizes it, and drenched or not, saved or not, something waltzes a little skewed, a bit lost and unforgettable.

16

Zelda Addresses the Feminists I was delivered to you--to be worn--I want you to wear me, like a watch--charm or a button hole bouquet--to the world. Zelda Sayre to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1919

Say he’s to blame for the luna moths in my head. Call my disease

Husband, say he stole words and memories for tender. Tinder box from my hopechest. You’ll say he sold me like a harem girl and I let him. Gave my ghosts a drop of my finest perfume and let them float lyrically through his books.

You see, I know how much has changed. But, all I wanted was to be Montgomery’s most memorable debutante, the first flapper, his bride.

Now you photograph Mars in the raw, the fleshy colors of a red planet’s passions.

Oh Sisters, I watched your distant fires from death’s quiet view and you burned the way stars do, the way Mars brews a swirly pink storm, shifting dunes and frosty sand—“Zelda weather” I’d ask they name it were I there.

Heaven has the best library and I yes I read you, read you all loud and clear.

Call it solidarity, my brassiere in flames (of course, I was still strapped in it). Madwomen all—we caught like paper dolls there was nothing left of me but a scorched slipper. I burned, Sisters, believe me I burned.

Ashes in my mouth, burning heart I thought I was Jesus heading back to heaven.

17

Yet, I’m not even trying to catch up with you. I was his beautiful child, his pretty girl, his princess. I’d lie beneath the weight of him even now And what it wouldn’t crush of me--it would thrill.

Understand only he could dive in to the wreck of me for the rest of me and bring me back. I just can’t hold your anger.

Finally, forgive me, I love him, that sorry man, my drunken genius, memory snatcher-blackmarket-dealer

-of-bootlegged-dreams. He’s a broken thing. I’m his lost cause but we’ve come this far, this lame.

18

Zelda Addresses the Literati

How tired you must be the lot of you. I mean you too, Ernest—the ever-so and aptly named. You were putting on parties, putting on manliness: a big cat’s hide for your hide-out.

I mean I see the boys that died in you. The boys that died to make you what you are which is earnest and empty. (The poor stupid dead boys thought you were just putting on airs). You wrote novels, won prizes, hosted things the world was yours for the ether. I mean I was there—looming and luminous But there was no matter, no matter. You were all so brilliant then, I could almost read by youiii 19

Among the Mattresses of the Dead “some people look at a shelf stacked with coffee mugs and see only mugs. But people with serious disorganization problems might see each one as a unique item — a souvenir from Yellowstone or a treasured gift from Grandma"iv 1

I. Any Hoarder’s Rebuttal

The skies coming up before us. The skies to outlive us, fireflies slowing in the jam jar of dawn, a rotten sea urchin found in the closet of the bungalow, feather of a raven, the t-shirt that says PIKE, the paper sculpture formed from a drinking straw wrapper, the wanting to keep, rain bouncing off the concrete in perfect glass marbles, gold and wine scarf from Thailand he draped around you, the snow he rolled into spheres for a snowball fight in July, some doll-size apple brought back for you--dried on the shelf and tinier still, rabbit with fur the color of charcoal, recipes written on napkins or postcards, matchbooks, a ponytail, a motel key, torn airline ticket from that last visit, each time you rode in the shopping cart, squealing, the lean edge on a Pink Pearl eraser, the last June you felt that pretty, the wanting to keep.

II. Hotel Eden, Summer Hotels "In the studio he would sort his finds into their eccentric categories - 'Spiders,' 'Moons,' and so forth - and file them with boxes of his own mementos, like love letters to Jennifer Jones and other movie stars or ballet dancers he'd never met; and from them he made boxes.”—Robert Hughes on Joseph Cornell

Boxes to keep them: the skies before us, skies to outlive us. What is any season but its things? (thunder, swallows, apricots, wind, dahlias, and so on) The ballet of winter trees. The frozen moment. The thaw. The extravagant gatherings everywhere you went. The dollhouse to surprise your daughter. I imagine you dried your dress in the window the fountain starching its fibers stiff.v It was a dress, Z, meant to carry a fountain home inside of it. You gave him an engraved silver flask. He gave you the rain of fireworks, tender nights, (terrible, too) September 7, 1918, eucalyptus and poinsettias, a blue and red parrot on the terrace, a pretty black bathing suit, Spiders, moons and so forth, the Victrola for the music he took back when visiting hours ended.

20

Bless You, Bless You

For the music you took away. For the music you took to making of our memories, though I was taken with you, taken aback by the petty theft of our collective remembering. I had taken to thanking you nonetheless for the music you took the pains to bring me to in the first place.

For the musings they’re still making from our song, our hunger: a round loaf of bread fallen into the harbor, the ecstatic silver chrysanthemum of sardines spinning it for all they were worth. 21

Among the Mattresses, After All

III. A frozen avalanche of coffee mugs lies in ambush by the cabinet door, each with a story that I’ve asked to be told. Today, time’s teeth on the Gatsby Gala mug black-ceramic-- cherished by my cherished one--just fissured at the handle, threatened, threaded with a spear of lightning. The epoxy I mix and pray will let it hold. 22

Paradisiacal (a postcard to Scott)

It sounds like something we’d ride in heaven. A night so cold, the moon some quiescently frozen confection served on a wooden stick, the stars: nonpareils sprinkled on each sky we use as canopy. Even our days run an hour off, give or take, depending, the way a total lunar eclipse means the moon’s solar eclipse, on celestial perspective. The ghostly theater of Saturdays, how to have imagined our movies played in different cities now--pure cinematography, if one camera could hold us both we’d be one nickel on a card table left outside as vanity for the moon where another coin keeps an earthly tabletop moon. There’s still so much sweetness between us. 23

The Dead Live like a Sun Ensnared in the Tree Between Us

No wonder the dead love you. You and your carrion crew graveyard the hours you imagine we sleep through.

(You’re the kind of carnage that could really get a desert all hot and bothered.) That sun is no porchlight, it dilapidates the cobblestone cloud-work, each day a boulder, each night a tiny avalanche.

The world is haloed by the dead. They hold hands like children rung around the rosies. They play ash ballads ripped from the trees and their saplings.

One block west we usher every spider to the twigged horizon.

They take turns with the magnifying glass we sleep through their cries. 24

Interpretations of the Rorschach Blots Placed Before Her A dissected fish A fractured rib. Cube of butter or a folded umbrella. There were those hands that were windows The meadow that way: tentacled terror A seashell butterflied face-down on the beach A horizon beating itself off Fancy dress walking a woman on the organza leash of sash. A hammered spoon. Nude woman ringing a firetruck bell. Her heart in flames. A face so naked the world withdraws. Mothlight, dead ballerinas spiral down from the bulb. Hung from the ceiling with black velvet rope. The moon as a pillbox seen from Earth. Perforated lungs. Dark tissue paper lanterns hanging in air. A form being touched with no one there. Undead azaleas grow dry between the bodies of old lovers. A gown wears a girl to a tinseled promenade. A scar shaped like a sailboat. Two bodies cupped and married float face down in a river. A butter knife held to a soft throat. The mother snaps a neck. Ruffle clouds. A hummingbird hung in cobwebs. A paper parasol broken and bleeding Color in the rain. A dollar in the gutter. A wagon wheel of lime. Tangerine wedges. Miniature canoes of dolor. Meandering man steps off the curb of wakefulness. A silvered child. Catacombs. Silk Road. A tombstone and its shadow the dead butterfly of remembrance. 25

What Our Dead Think About Hansel & Gretel

Our dead have dead of their own and those dead may or may not include us.

No way to revive or relive them. No way either to unlove them; so don’t ask them to.

They will love you until the day they’re dead (and then some). They will listen to your don’t-love-yous. only so long before signing off with: That’s your problem. You’re mine.

Don’t mind them. They’re low on oxygen which is you again, Lungfish.

They worry not about children lost in the woods or the way the girl will stand just outside a stand of trees crying for the boy wet from the damp air, an inebriation of late summer and terror. The liquor on his breath smells like the rest of her life. Our dead don’t even blink.

Our dead drop crumbs for no one to follow. No matter. No matter. We know the forest by heart.

26

The Teatime Girls Serenade Vincent on a Starry Night

We long to know what drove you to colors In azure swirls like ocean waves in flight, The darkened skies you filled with hallowed stars.

You wrung passion from a world that kept you far From it. Whirling blue to teal motion of light, we long to know what drove you to the colors.

How you caused paint to swim, to scream, to soar, until a tipped horizon’s seas ignite the darkest skies to fill with hollow stars.

How could you keep those midnight shadows far, as they began to grow too loud to fight? We’d ask you as you drove out to those colors.

What ghost lurks behind those steepled forms Reaching for aureoles of white, into skies you filled with boiled stars.

Somewhere does night pursue you now and are You still spinning torture into light? We long to know what drove you to your colors If darkest skies filled you with haloed stars. 27

Gone the Way of the Honeybees My Heartvi

Death more vast, more crowded than life ever was and paradise--if this is where we are so endless, so nowhere, quite vacuous. I searched for you my dear one, so far, too-loved, my near star—so close I was--then taken: young, by the throat, with you or because, a virus perhaps, an ancient gorgeous disease—my vanishing, your vanishing. Some sinister extinction a mystery: what started all this sweetness what leads to every sweetness undone. Whole colonies die: your goldness, their goldness: denouement—not gone yet but going; once proof to me of no less than God.

28

And How Many Skies Exhaled?vii

And how many ways are there to die? Dear Sylvia, pray tell and tell it well so that today taken in, pushed out by a lungy sky feels not fell like a cake or a lover. We are November’s raw material, and the body, (recall it?) is a mouthy, gaping thing. Three nights in a row I have dreamed of his body and the way a girl—dead or alive—will lay claim. Each night I rowed into his chest and what seas afloat a wife half-carved from soap and in a lather over a man she knows too well? The third night the dream man slept on the floor, did not come/to/to bed/his senses and what deaths we dreamed up were partial and the sky breathed a monster’s lungs: humongous parachute-silk tension—the dream fingers ate their way through to the form of him and what they digested invested them with small mouths and a taste for rivers briny as they are silky, silky as they are bitter. I take my men over like nations or infections. “I take my men at will” said the noir women who touch them while I am at the cold side of sanity and the night so hot, I am an egg flipping on the skillet of mattress. What I love: the spatula, and sleep? The place set for me at the table of another life: white porcelain--a ghostly white rose etched against the glaze. With each poem I tried to take him in my mouth, his name a thing to be offered out and then rolled back to the roof and oceanous motion. With each poem I rolled him inside me the note in the bottle of me, the ship uncaptained and marvelous for the construction down the dainty glass neck and held forever in a transparent journey. With each poem I gave him new stories kept him in the reliquaries inside reliquaries so that history would hold him as a breathing sky holds an atmosphere over a planet and a planet holds oceans between the continents that the clouds bust into shapes and the continents hold countries and states and cities and towns that hold people who hold bottles filled with notes or ships and they are keeping places, I tell you, and they fail us so often and so well. 29

Eaves

He slammed the night back in one shot. She polished off the belladonna birthday cake. Everything shook in its casing. Windows shimmered in their frames. Light shook against the words. Morning knock-kneed, skinnied along the fat night. That last night went to blows with the blueprints. The air confettied with graph paper, their lives torn off the grid.

Unbeknownst, they wept on a bearskin rug. Inebriated, they washed the house down with a garden hose, stacked boxes into cityscapes halving the living room into this village and that. He named his side Despondentville. She called her skyline His. They were never so meticulous and sincere. Excruciated they changed addresses like something soiled.

They were only weeks from imploding. Weak from the waiting room where the doctor said all the crops suffered from the dry spell, save for the basil gone to seed before the infamous gazpacho could be assembled. Everything gone the way of the dry season bristling and crackling like a campfire. She could hear rain dropping down its spider silks just up the road. He watched the glowworms of comets fall continually through the fake nightsky over their bed and made himself still and hard as a worrystone.

They copied handshadows from an old book, cast ostriches and garter snakes. 30

She dabbed lampblack from the shadows and blackened both her eyes. Dance with me, he said then. She wore the dress he bought her from the five dollar box at the French Market. He wore a smoking jacket and hate on his head a dandy of a departer. Dapper as a seersucker sky. All the pale ladies swooned. The dancefloor flittered with their paper fans. He offered her love as a paper parasol.

Empty as mouth the house waited, silverfish skimmed the shared books, their misplaced dustjackets arched like roofs against the floorboards.

The house waited sweeping itself clean of cobwebs, regret They hung a dreamcatcher over their bed, their dreams caught and held like siphoned insects, they tipped their days back and shot them fast, making do every day, and doing away with the night. 31

Poem Wishing to Lodge in the Roof of His Mouth

Tonight I can smell the hot tar poured this morning. There is no coverage for these kinds of collisions. Insurance plans and bodies refuse such blanket statements. He offered me the moon floating in a fat peach mug stolen from a revolving bar in Atlanta, Georgia, land of the free range traffic cops, home of the Braves.

We were circling in for the thrill. We were breathing, breathing the same town’s swimming pool air.

Clouds retched. The sky scudded in its lead apron. We lurched forward in the skeletons of our ancestors bone spurs and all, even the abacus of ribs amounted to little.

All those nights pounded down on us in thin bullets, tin rain. Nothing could take such a beating.

Forgive me when I say that sometimes his eyes peered out of your face like burners turned to their highest red dartboards. Sometimes I was a dart trying to propel myself into the line of vision. Other times an arrow craving his eye.

We were closing in on something close to what we came here for. Flying in the southbound lane like any plumed thing.

Sign here the dream he said to me, we’re closing on a house today. We moved in like a storm front, bumbled like bees in the gardens of a thousand years. The eaves pointed the way. It was eerie to be so always.

32

Assia Recalls

Lying under a well-hung sky, an endowment meant for the lesser satellites and what was I, if not that, if not theirs, my lover-husband, his late, ever-present wife.

What was I if not their little Israeli bird, pecking at their collective “I’s,” feeding from their cradle-moonly hands? What was I if not the villainess crouched in the corner of their parlour, their pralines stale and a murder of crows sends songbirds ascatter. What was I if not starling or sparrow, what were they if not night claws and caws and affect and what next if not consequence—the larger birds tearing the small ones asunder in the thunder of applause—the starry hands reverberating palm to palm and the echoes a rumbling miserable music. No song through me threaded its needled note, nothing strung its little lights around my ribs where what small, sung thing hung there, hangs mute.

33

Assia Composes

The word endarkenment gives me a campsite to carriage towards, a sanctuary in a word he has never uttered—crucial— because between them, they’d used them all. The taking-vapors to sustain us before we dropped. The pallor of our parliament.

From here, every river a silver necklace broken and crookedly metallic against the dry grasses. The woods are charred and the trees, used matches stuck upright in the miniscule horizon. How happy and ashen, how grey-laced and London. In those woods every bird a swallow, every swallow a stay against smothering. My body his birdhouse and he, bird of prey, tore me at the hinges; what loved him, loved him in spite. 34

Handsome, this Day: no Matter Who Has Died:viii Elegy for the Polaroid Instamaticix

Remind me again of the marriage it wasn’t. Make mine the story kept in the spare room, a single bed, sunken with the shape of the boy you haven’t been for a decade or two. Let me lie in it, a cake of soap curving and decreasing to meet its casketine-cave. Listen, I tell the dead our story each night, wander in circles like a night-robed Giselle, saving you, cursing you in the same breath.

To be phantomed here: a ghost among ghosts--starker, harder and more gossamer—is to be phantomed-beyond. If you, Husband, had died first, how little we’d have heard the widow’s name that begins and ends in a gasp. Instead: always her, the sylph of your life’s forest, always first wife, everywhere the other went, the first had already been. What she left for us: poetry, fingerprints, books that flew open to her favorite passages, her own passage never ceasing.

When you wrote my truest wife, the absolute and obsolete spookily aligned. Good-bye photographs reeled out like a tongue from the camera’s grin. Gone the way of the rotary phone, eight-track tapes, black and white television, the gramophone. Gone the way of us. Take it from me, Ted : every love poem turns elegy. So let’s speak to what emerges in the late-darkrooms of the body, between organs, inside bones. The words and the order in which they find us, find us lacking even now. Listen, I have slept alone with you felt that former you fold around me as a ghost, that deep-eyed boy you shed like a husk cameoed into the mattress, and I have slept alone off (like a hangover). The form of your college-body in the bed a shallow grave for the contours of your earlier self where the word now buries those before-yous and the now-you proves that they were, while this first grave proves your birth and your birth proves itself against me as the thumb tastes a knife’s cutting promise as a wedding photograph 35 proves us linked, proves we were here, proves we were.

Things emerge from the suggestion of shapeliness: a contour, Picasso’s line drawings that the eyes resolve--the body knows what it knows. The body lays claim--lifts the memories like silly putty. My body echoing the shape of the fossil your body leaves on the bed’s surface and from that relief to remember, to retain that slight boy’s sorrow and to lift it whole from him. Things emerge from the mere hint of a form, my spine reading the blind hollow where your spine zippered, gavel-echoed, a grave of sorts into the ticking. The body knows its own kind, dead-man, and that embedded-you, haunts that awful brocade (the fabric of the mattress and the inside of coffins a bit too richly, silkily, sickly the same) called to those too willing to die your first wife and I: ripples off the stone-you dropped into the pool of bed, and that boy welcomes us into his eternal rest.

2. The caped camera, the blast of light, the boom, the cobwebbed darkroom, and more, the faith; the images we had to believe a roll of film held, and if not, we left absent of those memories.

The camera inside me resists all this history. The imagery that refuses to emerge, just a child, our girl, Shura: the picture I would tear from you for good. Here’s a question Great Haunter, Good Ghostling, did your concave self spoon into me as I slept? Did the dying that your death met in the graveyard of my bones (each knuckle a headstone, each rib a sideways tomb) turn you on a bit? Rest assured, O Polaroid Impulse Flash, your capturing instant was blinding. 36

Assia Ponders His Long-Ago Unanswered Boudoir Queries

What does it feel like? The way taffy pulls pearly against the gears the music of milk-thistle rather the way that phrase mirrors a tension, the satining and bend running through the machine steady and stretched thin until almost see-through in its sheen, the mother-of pearl swirl and pull the way the body feels taut, poised but full the spill of light, the grinding of machine, inevitable rise and return of sweetness smoothed, the extension, the churn.

What are you thinking? And no words arrive--just the live wires of nerves, endings, gleaning the sigh of skin to skin, to sheet, and a body so fine-tuned and keening that no thought forms itself around the high-pitched prayer of my first language, of all language, of what I am or where. Not for the last time, I’m sure, but I have forgotten for the moment just who I am and the burden of that corpse lifted, has sent my vowels and consonants scattered from the perches of the mind and if I opened my too-tightly closed eyelids just now to find a roomful of my favorite things, I suspect they’d feel removed from me as I feel just now, freed from me, So that bouquets of cornflowers might arrive, the scent of ponderosa pine: vanilla, linen, musk, the things that enchant me, and, unless I brought myself back from this island we are, I couldn’t take them in. What are you thinking? There are no words just then liquid sun, the chestnut light in your gaze, your hands your hands your hands and their ways with leafing through as each woman were a card catalogue of appetites and the night that falls hard on the hungry. There are not words inside me, just a steady vibrato and a dull bite.

Tell me what it’s like, as if I could tell it in words to a man who owns all the words But I want to tell you now as it’s all fallen to dust our bodies leaving us nostalgic, undone as bodies must I know what it meant to be somehow exquisite to make the gaze that a man might visit upon me hold and keep hold. I held you, Word-One, wordlessly held on, our respective marriages undone. That look you claimed was nearly circusesque-so-perplexed might well have been wonder at your hands, their fluency with the night within the body, (as well as without). An intricacy to the intimacy, some ornate spell on the skin, exotic tongue and such fluency. It’s like the moment before a deep burn when the touch freezes 37 registers the sharpest cold, and then translates the heat, seizes it as burn, as branding. You nearly made me your own sometimes but she stood in the hallway and called me out,called Assia what rhymes with breath? with sighing? Assia, I a bride and you a bride of a man that sends us back to our own hand, by our own hand, this tide and undertow, the rude afterlife for afterglow, nothing little to these deaths and no intake of air lovelier than those straggling last breaths.

With you one might comprehend how it is that when we end things begin, or from our brutal, crucial start others pulled apart and when we found ourselves free to float on the choppy waters of one another’s bodies, we found ourselves immersed, in all that falters unrehearsed, unreversed, Like a warmth spreading like liquid sun, like all the ribbons that tie our organs together unspooling at once. Like the plastic bag that tries each gap in the gate before forcing itself through, a lung oxygenated against the clear, wild blue.

Like the stand-up bass must feel with the elaborate friction rosin, horsehair, the soft scream of string and stirring, the tenderness both tear and tear and something insistent, the man’s full lips as he spoke to that instrument his hand gentle some and harsh at the neck, the warm grip on that bent wood, the curve and curl of it, a wave paused in mid-crash, the oceanic rhythm, the force of tide, the silkiness of his voice spoken frantic but whispery and the words hissed out sizzling, risqué, the man, the bass, they have something desperate and heated to say to each other and watching from that nightclub chair I felt I was intruding on them there—they were lovers in a way and their secrets were our own once, weren’t they?

38

Riverine Tremble Waterglass Splinter x And it is never like that again, lustrous silk, shaking. Reetika Vazirani

And it is never like that rain slicker of memory a color like eggs, like fruitskin an overcast memory vivified the gray punching everything crayola And it is never like much. Old hotel. Hold what you hold in percale purity. A cotton pillowcase to carry all her belongings for the journey.

The watermark of something spilled leaves room for a gaze so fine, so like that tree spine over her left shoulder verisimilitude to a silkworm sobbing a sari so finely spun it could choke the throat of a wedding band but nothing more.

A housefly ghosts a room webbed as parchment. Clean again. Pillared hotel towels. Dry winter brides. Pure. A cake of floating complimentary soap. Their dark heads meeting always meeting in a kiss. Lyrical.

And it is never like that again. That again. Precision repeat. A ribbon of cassette torn at the place of most replay. A favorite song worn thin, fine as tributary veins wristed webs green and purple. An insect’s x-ray on a transparency to map out the confluence: the Y of intersection Man, woman, child. That again—lustrous. Vermillion down the parted 39 hair of a wife. Blade, blood. Silk spillage. Knife and wrists like flowers opening, blooming. Silk. That again gone. Lustrous. Skeletal tree. Silk leaves shaking. A weaving of whys.

40

A Given Dayxi But aren’t they all (albeit un-given) the shadow of the giver’s hand still darkening the edge of the gift warning nothing’s yours for long.

But if miracles are like eggs fragile-shelled and oozing and if miracles, like eggs can be hard or soft-boiled given enough heat and time and a cosmic waitress in a crisp uniform, a sheaf of notes that read Guest Check (stranger in a strange land aren’t we always guesting where we mean to be known?) Then oh-husband-of-another-life, if this is your order then this is mine.

One soft miracle on any given day for a given number of years. Genie wishes, incantations, magically-charged fairytale number to suggest me and thee and a third thing stronger than both. O dearest three, I am not what I expected.

Self-assessing and confessing as I’m doomed to be, maybe I was born for this. Born to be a woman of excess and excuses. Born to be heart-driven and chronically late. I was wrong when I said the dead belong to me. Now I can tell you: The dead belong to no one. Could be they never did. Here I am on the other side of that ether and still I don’t belong. But we do talk back. That much remains.

I told you didn’t I? Even crazy 41

I’m as nice as a chocolate bar. Darkly sweet and bad for you as I am good which can be very or not at all.

I meant to write a love poem. One about the way I knew things I never told. Three years in and I knew I was not what you meant to love. I am a fist of my unease rising at the broken shell of ozone towards that yolkish yellow sun. I was double-born a twin of a twin, ghostless and gone.

I was a daisy girl to be spun between two fingers until I turned into a windmill if it would please you.

When the wind rose and the petals lost themselves to the orbiting yes of a full circle somehow you’d know what it meant: Your touch is all.

42

For a Man Overheard Once Mentioning Fondness for the Word Darling

The words fall in like daggers or dares or my darling Falling in like rain or paper fish in rain or the words Written on the backs of paper fish in magic marker in rain running rivers of blackness darker than shade at midnight in strange enchanted woods the sword of moonlight stabs the air to where we found the black cat darling miracle on velvet paws and made a home for it and sewed a you and me into the swoon that woos and soon wounds us all, Darling.

To be where you are, Darling, for a shiny penny an old medicine bottle dug from a hillside a scrap of broken pottery to mosaic a menu for the dishiest night ever, the daziest night. Let’s swing from the moon, touch a bathwater sky with pointed toes and this one destination: Darling.

And this wish, to be where you are for the duration, Darling To be nowhere else for the world, Darling.

43

Silver Key: Anne Writes a Note to a Young Psychiatrist She Sees Stargazing through a Skylight Above His Bed

You were reading the rain, the burning magnesium, the fissure of quartz through a skylight I’ve never slept beneath.

You were reading the nevermind-me-Princess-fairytale I was reading your way with words arranged metrically against my pulse.

Turn out the light, my Blasé Beloved, turn out the darkness, call me up, let’s read the fissure of quartz I’ve never slept beneath you with words arranged metrically against my pulse. I’ve never read the turn- out-the-light look in your eyes—a rainstorm restrained. The skylight: a page this weather types-out a greeting card on nightly, fractured, teeming with star’s bright-eyes peering back.

When lightning strikes, suspect me: your due-North Artemis, shooting an arrow of light to you, my landlocked healer.

Call it faith, a way with words, the sky, lightweight lovers, the rain read after hours I’ve never slept beneath. Thunderstorms will always be yours.

44

A Happened Balloonxii

August vows, I’m up late remembering, I thought you: sealed envelope or birthday gift you said you have yet to open me then left, then left, then left.

For all that sealed it, (you envelope, you gift,) I’ve admonished myself—and you, too who left and left and left me to be the one who misses you.

I’ve astonished myself but not you Who used up all of his wonder then left, who’d named himself The One Who Misses You Oh Anne what do we leave them to do?

Who used up the wonder then left? A grove of balloons where we were kept, our breath bloomed inside each bloom, and then we leave them, too. A happening to happened-thing.

A grove of shrinking balloons were what we kept, that birthday party of our-yet-opening: an art display, some happiness, some happening, Come here, Pretties, come here, we have some presents left.

45

In the Art Gallery of After: Anne Closes the Door on the Starry Night

Vincent, I can’t speak to you of this again. So many rounds around those drain-circling stars, the sky a flush and a sky must wait behind that sky poised to swallow these demons, your stars, your demons, these stars, the steeple-punctured heavens, whole. Vincent, I’ve written to you about this one. The way everything is humming, or sliding away. The way the sky seems craggy with angry building, the way your world is both light-dancing-light and melting away. I can’t do it anymore, the circumlocution of constellations, the way I pretend to connect the dots, pretend I’m not that sky, you’re not the blizzards of dizzying stars, my present to you: seeing as you see and trying not to let it take me down. Your present to me: a heaven’s nausea.

46

Dear Doctor,

It would be interesting if you held me up to the light, a liminal color, your voice is a trip-wire my sanity a lost soldier.

The telephone an enemy field. A dialtone replaces your voice and sometimes, I find it more intimate to hang on the line like a bat or suicidal someone. So many kinds of breaks available:

I prefer linebreaks, unstoried, the boy, the girl, the donkey, the house, unstoried each of them unsure of who we are (by we I mean me, by we I mean us) The poetics b/w us include serious truths, Plato to Play-Doh. The poets are wacked, re-mold them. The trees wear white parkas, we make snow angels, and the snow falls into them filling and killing them all at once. We understand that.

It seems like art: the six pistachio shells on the left side of your desk. I want to keep them for the still life I’m calling this romance For the romance you’re calling a still-life. Kill us some time, Doctor. You’re a single shooting star, I’m a child in footed pajamas looking up to the sky or are we swapping costumes? It’s past my bedtime, Doctor. Don your scrubs and hide your treasured chest and its jeweled heart. You are no match for me, Doctor I’ll ask for three moving vans: triumvirate of terror, the promise of three stinging touches, a still-born affection declares itself proudly and who can resist its charms, what harm in loving it on its terms. Maybe, this won’t hurt—just a little pressure. Maybe, this isn't as bad as it once seemed. Maybe "I am the luckiest person to exit the house today." Or maybe you're the luckiest person to leave my life, who can say? The answer is written in invisible ink, is written in stones, is written. Somewhere a post office collects dead letters that await retrieval, like us, like sent packages, like so much--the answer continues downstream . The buildings shed their shadows. The sidewalk slips into something dreary and I want to slip you some sugar, but what Sir Set-on-Sourness would you do with it? Would you light it on fire? Would you fire us up? Smoke us out. Or smoke us for the temporary haloes? Circle this day as a thing to be remembered. Then forget it, whatever fondness remains donate to charity or go buy cheap love for such canaries as littered the air with singing, for such and such, ergo, hunger remains, money does not, and I am feeling a slightly oceanic sense of today. 47

Any Livable Fallxiii for Sarah Hannah, in memory & infinite florescence

I. The view from this altitude is incredible and makes me feel like falling should be a way of living. So it is. I’m the girl fallen from a poem about a girl fallen from a blown-open cabin door on a plane some 30,000 feet above ground. If that much distance could be loaded up on a scale, if falling could be weighed, I’d be the girl with 15 tons of leaving draped across her body. Or I’m a mythological boy fallen straight into Brueghel’s painting about Icarus. Or I’m what history does to myth, carries it forward, so that mythy Icarus becomes boy fallen into Brussels and then to a poem by Auden and from there, so many centuries stacking up, why not a flight attendant who falls to her death and into a poemxiv? Since there’s so much falling going on, let me interject myself here. I am a girl headed for heaven in reverse.

II. I mean to say I’m falling upward and so-sadly. What ekphrasis this: to be a still-life and then a peopled-painting then I’m the girl in the art gallery who wants more than anything to fall in. There’s Sylvia laughing from that eastern cloud singing dying is an art, I do it exceptionally well. Then a command in her near-British tongue: Do it so it feels like hell. But this doing is an undoing and it feels well… paradisial. The landing, no doubt, will be another matter. 48

III. And it is fall, after all. But I can’t see, can only really imagine what the confetti of leaves must be like hanging with their mean-pointed leaves in the dark. The Chinese stars of maples aimed at Autumn’s eye. I can’t really worry about the studded pines or barbed thistles. By the time I can name them they will be mine, or I theirs, depending on the angle from which you paint us. But from up here, the world is done in acrylics, drying quickly and with little take- back, unless you gesso it all up and begin anew. That’s God’s domain waters, fires, the thick slap of white on a messed-up rendering. Mine is the free-fall, the freeing fall with its bushes aburn in the colors that fires wear when they’re showing-off. From here, the world is acrylic, unforgiving; but keep dropping down and a richness begins, keep falling and you reach oil— the world painted in oils: heavy in aroma, not yet dry—so therefore, revisable. Oh Sylvia, of the beekeeper father, the art to it is how good you have to be with so little chance to practice. Syl, with apiaries in her yard, in her poems, I keep all my bees in my bonnet and frankly, they often (too often) keep me. The orderly hexagons, the making of the sweet counterbalanced against the buzz and sting of it all makes what honey there is some hard- won sugar. 49

IV. For several seconds a glide, a maple-key’s propellered helix balleting down.

VI. So it’s Fall. Everything blazes then burns-down in the cold tongues of winter. What fires we build, we bank and that circle of stones makes us crave some petrifying. As for a reason, is that a thing you askxv of a girl with a beehive in her brain who is falling past your reading glasses at the speed of falling-far: reason? The facts of the thing, the blasé beloved, the getting-older-as-a-woman, the too-slow magic trick where you are girl placed into the box, sawed in half then vanished, each have their tiny claim. But the reasons were oily things— smearable, malleable, shape-swapping things. The trees that cast their sylvan shadows might go willowy in their oak skins even as we grow them. The shadows standing all-wrong, dancing the wrong dance on the toes of their casting trees. There are things wrong with a day but we ride it out, there are things right we barely notice. What weathers we weather best are difficult to know. But I have fallen now and certain falls are worth certain landings— however hard.

V. I am fresh out of reason just now. I am the girl falling into the art of falling. I am the girl painted-into the corners of my life. What I have by now is less reason than a terminal velocity. The point in a life when the page fills with clouds and the clouds look like they did when we were small, before we were told they wouldn’t hold us, when we still believed that a thing that seemed soft like that, real as cotton or a rabbit or a plump, white sofa, when we look up and think as the hypothermic do, when the snow ceases to be bitter and creates the warm, lulling thought: this blizzard need not be a stinging thing, I could lie down in that, I could finally sleep.

50

Attenuationxvi

It’s just that I wore the gray shawl you brought back from Sicily and it didn’t keep me warm.

It’s just that winter always does this little two-step thing with other seasons in this godforsaken landscape of tricked flora and fauna.

Chalk it up as just one more sucker-punch before harvest time.

It’s just because we could not stop for dread, it kindly made us a key.

It’s just that I loved the way you found shinies, wore army green, often forgot to shave and left little Rorschach throw-rug beasts on the underside of your chin.

It’s just that the lifeguard post gave us a lookout, stuck up in the sky as we were like a stupid billboard of lovers at the beach, a tangled blue mess above us and below the nightwater in its skirts of granulated silver gained ground, lost it and so on it went even without us, even now, I’d guess.

The marriage held just ourselves and infidelity.

It’s just that- just that we found regret even in the egret poised dumb-dancerly at the marsh’s edge, even in the early magnolias—big as a boxer’s head, even in the baby birds, the buried bottles, the shopping mall and twenty-four hour video, in divinity with or without pecans.

It’s just the way we wave goodbye—two-fingered antennas: a peace sign folding in on itself.

51

Let the Figure Be a Child

Let the figure be a child held in a snow globe held in the hand of another child held in a snow globe. The earth shifts, snows find the figures fighting the snows.

His voice is a cloud that goes away is a line from a book

Our dead grow groves of cypress trees this passage is not over A cloud is his voice that goes away.

Let the figures rest. The grim reaper calls himself by your name. The name just shoots across the room. No telephone strikes the night into singing. Inside it’s all ringing like a fire station. Everywhere in the city aburn. A flier for a lost cat says it otherwise. Our name in lights some nights. Color and fruit a certain dolor to the singings.

The evening purpled-in smoke was his voice was a cloud that goes away.

Let the figure first break glass to carry at last the other: blizzard-blind for a time then the thaw. The soil an unswept heaven of styrofoam snow teeth of glass. Then the melt, visions return. A cloud is his voice that goes away.

A swarm of insects fed from our skins We were fine-tuning the signal broadcast from outer-space. Summer begins and summer does its doings-in. A swarm of insects took us in. Stay a while. Do not touch that dial.

That was the first season. There is only one May, with locked doors and windows we tend it.

52

I have seen and I have seen There is no end and then again.

Speak into the cold, Love this is the season where words take shape. One figure turns away and inside two hands tear a piece of paper in two.

Inside and every single time the turn then the ladder of spine the hands inside rip paper down the middle this nearer year this nearer year.

So seriously does the automated voice at the phone company ask that we wait on the line. Someone will be with us shortly. Let the figure speak of lost things while we wait on the line.

Before the end of hours scattered like snows in a tunnel of wind Let the figure be.

And if you ask how I regret that parting And if you ask how I regret: there is no winter enough to explain.

53

Only Paradise

Like those children that enter the world pale doubtless wonders and then darken with time. so many things die in us.

A husk of an engineless Mercury sits rust-scabbed in the front lawn.

Like those children uncertain of all save that they enter. Her father, in the kitchen cooking for three daughters, leaving the house and leaving the house. The cigar-end of cucumbers he cut for their salads (and ritually placed between his eyebrows) were only what they were; not crisp discs of memory, not carriage wheels wheeling to eternity. Not the seed pearls in their chrysanthemum bloom, not some dancing in a ballroom of doom.

But they are dancing. Reeling and wheeling. While the tow truck arrives.

The signature of someone who died that next winter from her then-living hand found on a greeting card today & re-miracalized in the I am here of that careful script.

What to tell the others? We have gone on. (The world is as it used to be.) The dead car removed from the front lawn. The vehicle that won’t go has gone.

54

Drawing Lines: Medbh McGuckian as Trap-Setter and Puzzle-Maker

In a 1988 interview, Medbh McGuckian referred to her poems as puzzles and in

"Ballycastle Beach" she refers to her words as traps. While many critics are interested in the disjointed locations, the non-linear time constructions and shifting subjectivities of

McGuckian's work which impose the effect of puzzles and traps, others note that

McGuckian’s puzzles and traps run the risk of circumventing the political history of

Northern Ireland and the implicit artistic responsibility that is inherited by a native of such a tumultuous landscape. However, I think that McGuckian’s puzzles and traps may be shrewd obfuscators and tools for empowerment that allow their designer to find a place within such a chaos, and to hide out from direct, head-on dealings with the politics. In so doing,

McGuckian writes from a more liberated perspective, thus amplifying the battle-cry of her poems.

I would like then to examine how McGuckian’s poems, through a few techniques such as dislocation, subject slippage, point-of- view and tense variation are able to provide a powerful, cryptic voice and a voice more artistically free to represent as a woman, a writer and a postcolonial body. The tension is drawn between political responsibility and the aesthetic freedom. In light of that, it is only so interesting to examine how McGuckian creates a clear, secret place within her poetry without speculating as to why. Far from shirking her political responsibility as a woman, as a mother and as a citizen of a postcolonial city, McGuckian's clever and various deferrals, dodges, and slantwise dealings with these issues are actually examples of her active engagement with Ireland and all of its troubled historical cargo. Further, through the examination her various techniques I hope to show 55 that McGuckian helps to map out a way for artists to re-claim their aesthetic territory.

Even more significant for the discussion of this particular poet: her use of these techniques shows that, while under the awnings of so many kinds of oppression what remains to re-claim are the abstractions: time, voice, sense of place and belonging.

McGuckian, in a word-by-word fashion, steals the sense of comprehension from her readers, so that what they thought that they held, be it time or place or an identifiable speaker or voice, alters even as they grasp at it, thus empowering the writer not only as the piece is being created, but with each attempted reading of it. In that way, her poems are holding their own rallies, their own minor uprisings each time that they are read.

The poem, “The War Ending” is stocked with images that continually resist meaning and in so doing simply resist as they do here with the image “silk glides though your name/like a bee sleeping in a flower/or a seal that turns its head to look/at a boy rowing a boat.” The deferrals and negations characteristic of many of her poems sometimes absent themselves in another way so that one subject slips inside another as it does as “The War

Ending” then continues with “your passion for light/is so exactly placed,/I read them as eyes, mouths, nostrils,/disappearing back into their mystery/like the war that has gone/into us ending;”(McGuckian 68). This image begins with a singular passion placed exactly and read as eyes, mouth, nostrils and then packed back into (the plural) their mystery--as if they had ever left it. Before we have fully grasped them, an entire war folds into that other odd plural subject: of the “us” (which, in a McGuckian poem, neither completely makes of itself a larger communal collective subject nor settles exactly on a more intimate “us”) so that the objects look like nothing so much as that which contains them, that is to say, that the objects appear just long enough to be contained in costume or some other variety of disguise.

Additionally, though it seems most likely that the suggested reading is that the war 56 disappearing into “us” is ending, the words “us” and “ending” allow for the war to have

“gone into” the collective called “us” (however numerous the bodies of it) and within that way of seeing “gone into” to serve more as that of an ingredient stirred into the ending of that “us” while the war’s fate is rendered indeterminate through this reading. This slippery reading is further played out as we look back to the title phrase that tilts even as we read it, allowing, at once, for the “The War Ending” to point to the conclusion of a battle or of something ending in battle, thus signaling the war as the conclusion to what was previously not at war. These multiple possibilities cancel any one reading, thus leaving no certain conclusion to the title’s intended reading. The several possibilities serve to function as a kind of crowd that potential prey might enter in order to lose a predator. If the word

“labyrinth” is suggestive of a maze of shrubs or trees then this McGuckian-landscaped poem replaces the flora with individual bodies that function much in the same way to form a trail meant to confuse and mislead with its curved-corridors and considered and deliberate dead- ends. Within such a labyrinth, a knowing-body is able to race inside and further be hidden away by the other bodies and to be hidden too, as a function of the informed sense of the maze itself and the agile passage into and through it, at will. Knowledge-as-weapon will prevail and provide safety in a place of one’s own design and through the interiority and all of the keys that inside-knowledge provides the designer, or in this case, the poet, a wise, graceful puzzler.

McGuckian's poetry in its most innocent manifestations is replete with mazes and puzzles. In their more devious moments, her poems are traps and landmines written to confuse, lose or snare "the wrong people." Her poems deliberately and systematically resist a unified reading, and like much art, they often begin as reactions. The reaction might be posited as a response to a larger aesthetic, a political observation, or something more private, 57 such as the poet's own body of work and the attempt to both add and alter that body with each new piece of writing.

Within these poems we are never far from the idea of woman and of body which, through its acts of reading and its engagement with text, objects, creates a difficult sense of what is being violated, penetrated, integrated, translated and finally re-fragmented in the language, the body itself, the breakdown and exchange of objects as “Breaking the Blue” quoted here in full, illustrates as well as any of her work. Pay close attention to the final stanza’s opening lines and careful line-break at the word “leave” and how it leaves the line’s unit of attention standing for a moment at this idea: “Fragments of once-achieved meaning, ready to leave.” This phrase might alone stand as an ars poetica for our reading of

McGuckian’s strategy, if any single phrase might be used to encapsulate an aesthetic that so- thoroughly, variously and constantly resists encapsulation. With that in mind, consider

Deluged with the dustless air, unspeaking likeness: You, who were the spaces between words in the act of reading, A colour sewn on to colour, break the blue.

Single version of my mind deflected off my body, side-altar, sacramental, tasting table, leaf to my emptying shell, heart with its aortic opening,

your mouth, my dress was the scene that framed your shut eye like hand or hair, we coiled in the lifelong snake of sleep, we poised together

against the crevice formed by death’s forefinger and thumb, where her shoulder splits when desire goes further thant the sender will allow.

Womb-encased and ever-present mystery without release, your even-coloured foliage seems a town garden to my inaccessible, severely mineral world.

Fragments of once-achieved meaning, ready to leave the flesh, re-integrate as lover, mother words, that overwhelm me: You utter become music, are played. (McGuckian 69.)

58

McGuckian’s poems read as if she begins knowing that only she can manage her way

out, but too, to see if her readers might find themselves trapped or bewildered within. For

this reason, I am less inclined towards creating a kind of key to a McGuckian poem, since

her work asks of its readers another way of reading, or rather other ways of reading. Instead,

I will be focusing on the various techniques she uses to create such deliberate dislocations

between a more linear narrative reading of her poems and a fragmented, displaced, unreliable

one. In addition to examining how she does this, I will speculate as to why the poems are

stylistically fragmented and how through that fragmentation, they are granted power. The

words, through various techniques of defamiliarization, act as puzzles, as traps, to withhold

or delay the secrets which might solve or spring them. McGuckian’s moves are sly enough

to allow their subjects to move fast enough to leave in her wake the poem she would have

written in any world. In this way, McGuckian allows that even in the case that a literal unlocking were possible, that the diligent, careful reader might track the poem and arrive at a

satisfactory "solution," it would not maintain a set reading for even as the poem was being

“solved” it slipped away. At that time, the wily McGuckian character is a dozen new puzzles

down the line; by then the McGuckian speaker is safely designing the next puzzle. "It is not

so much that she is being obscure," states Peter Sirr, "as that her reference points are usually

out of sight, and the compass that could guide us through a thousand lyrics spins uselessly

here." (457).

The poem “She Which Is Not, He Which Is” illustrates the untrackable aspects of

McGuckian’s subjects and objects. The title is uncharacteristically straightforward in its

admission of the sly tricks of subjectivity until the poems open with

An elm box without any shape inscribed like a tool in the closed vessel of the world; I will be flat like a dream on both sides or a road that makes one want to walk. (McGuckian 70.) 59

This establishes little by way of set speaker, narrative and then moves to simile, not

in the traditional use of the simile which is to attempt, in the way one might attempt to

describe a new object to one newly-blind: to use one known image to gain greater access to a

new or another image, but here it is used rather to re-route meaning so that the simile

becomes a kind of rotary that spins the reader off the direction s/he was driving towards

initially, and onto another road. Unfortunately for a plot-driven, systematic reader, this road

that makes one want to walk is only one branch of a subject that is forked and includes the

self with plans to be like an abstraction that is flat on both sides. The destination or even

possible destinations of the road are not given and were they to be, no matter: this road may

not even be one that engages the “one who wants to walk.” In other words, this road might

remind one that s/he wants to walk elsewhere and since elsewhere is one of McGuckian’s

favorite locales, such infinite deferral seems as likely as not.

The next stanza begins: “My words will be without words/like a net hidden on a

lake,/their pale individual moisture.” These lines, are somewhat more cohesive, in the way

that the image continues to play itself through in a relatively systematic manner as it weaves

down the stanza and the tenor of the simile contains some allegiance to its vehicle. But this image is crucial, in that even visually, it gives the reader the reassurance that if s/he feels bewildered, somehow “at a loss” s/he is still on the grid of the poem. The pattern isn’t so

much invisible as it is camouflaged. What this does not do is reassure the reader that the

speaker is still located on the poem’s grid. Later in the poem, the following

“ Without the help of words, words take place” that perhaps it is of little consequence where

the speaker is located since the implication here is that language, exists and assists even

through its own absence. This line draws a different kind of distinction, which is that this is

not the attempt to lose every reader but rather the attempt to reassure the astute or rather, in 60

Frostian terms “ the right reader” that the net is spread out over the lake’s surface, a

submerged but present pattern.

At least this submerged net resembles the traps and puzzles that McGuckian has

named as synonyms for her poems. Both traps and puzzles are concerned with how a body

is detained or immobilized in its attempts to traverse a given distance. Traps and puzzles are

not random in the way that they capture or delay a body; rather, they are strategic. as these

poems are strategic. McGuckian employs a variety of strategies, which have ties to the

poet's complicated identities in her roles as a writer, a mother, a woman, and a citizen of

postcolonial Ireland. I have attempted to lay out those nouns separately and not allow one to modify the other, to avoid, for example, stating that Medbh McGuckian is a postcolonial woman writer. While I am interested in how her poetics might, at times, be ballrooms or

battlefields for these separate terms, I am avoiding the temptation to see any or all of these

nouns in such a cumulative or politicized way that they lose their capacity as separate and

distinct modifiers of the poet or the poems. I do this to highlight the sophistication of

McGuckian’s various methods and aesthetic strategies as something other than another

simple enactment of Barthes’s Death of the Author re-dux described as “writing…the

destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite,

oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting

with the very identity of the body writing…the voice loses its own origin, the author enters

into his own death, writing begins. (Sered 6.)

McGuckian’s subject engages in more of a missing-in-action version of slipping

away, with the emphasis placed upon the “action” portion of the phrase for the way it keeps

the act of disappearing--be it through slipping one’s skin or leaving a designated place--a

perpetually-active absence rather than a blunt blow to the authorial head and the passivity 61 that would result from such a strike. McGuckian does not kill so much as she transforms, destabilizes, disguises, places and re-places the self and the world: time, place, and the understanding of the objects of it. “For McGuckian then, the postmodern qualities of selfhood and language are all sources—not limits of utterances. It is this differentiation between source and limit that distinguishes her conception of authority from the more familiar postmodern one.” (Sered 4).

In “Hotel,” in a typically fluid manner, McGuckian charts for us the way she would name her character: "I would bestow on her a name with a hundred meanings, all of them secret, going their own way"(McGuckian 36 ). This bestowal delays the creation of the character. Instead, through this move, she announces a kind of literary blueprint, the intention to name, each name inherent with mobility. The syntax suggests that not only will the name's meanings be afforded the talent for going their way, but that the "her" bearing this name will be awarded the same liberty. Additionally, it should be noted, that she even complicates this moment further by keeping it within the language of intention, a kind of perpetual future tense, as opposed to saying "I bestow on her" or "I have bestowed on her"

McGuckian keeps even the moment of christening deferred. Critics have dealt with this move in her poetry by stating that the body of the woman is often a metaphor for the land.

By extension, many describe McGuckian's poems of motherhood and the frustrations therein as frustrations at Mother Ireland. There is often a sense of postcolonial seepage coming through some of the poems which McGuckian has referred to as those poems written while she was frustrated and trying to take care of babies while attempting to be an artist. McGuckian has too carefully avoided such x =y kind of correlation in her codes for any kind of conclusive “solving” of them. Her codes exist to lend her the power of trapmaker, mapmaker. There is a power in the creation of these traps and puzzles and power 62

too, in the relative certainty that they will not be readily unlocked or solved. The effect she

achieves is one of captive audience and with that, an additional advantage, for were the

poem literally a war zone through which a speaker requires escape, delaying those in pursuit

by stalling for time would allow the speaker sufficient time for schemes and escapes. The

McGuckian poems then, capture and captivate the reader who is in hot pursuit of meaning,

while simultaneously allowing the speaker maximum freedom and mobility. This is achieved

in a number of ways.

1. Ice cream. You Scream First, and often discussed, is the slippage of her subjects. Colloquially broken down,

she gives the “I” the slip. But she wriggles away from the “you,” as well; her speakers and

her addressees are often ambiguous. Subjectivity is not at its strangest in this example but

witness subjectivity’s expansion in how “The Flitting” begins with this quoted line:

“You wouldn’t believe all this house has cost me—

in body language terms, it has turned me upside down”

I’ve been carried from one structure to the other on a chair of human arms, and liked the feel of being weightless, that fraternity of clothes… Now my own life hits me in the throat (McGuckian 26.)

Opening as the poem does in quotations, we might assume it is a line of overheard dialogue

but the third line continues with an I that is not quoted—the same I? A new speaker? It is

not possible to say.

The second stanza will not be useful in making this distinction either as it

introduces a third person and that third person might be the source of the opening dialogue

or a veiled-way of describing all the characters haunting the poem which may at last be one character or none the following lines will only state another kind of ars poetica for how speakers and characters (particularly feminine characters) occupy (or wander away from) 63

fixed-identity: “She seems a garden escape in her unconscious…

Who knows what importance she attaches to the hours? Her narrative secretes its own values as mine might if I painted half of me that welcomes death in a faggotted dress, in a peacock chair, no false biography…”(McGuckian 26.)

Perhaps it seems that a direct address would refresh the weary reader or a second

person but as one might guess: the McGuckian “you” is nearly always at play, as well. As

here in “Marconi’s Cottage” we are given “the bed of your mind has weathered/books of

love, you are all I have gathered to me of otherness; the worn glisten/of your flesh is

relearned and reloved.” (McGuckian 73.) Much of the imagery in this poem such as “now I

am close enough, I open my arms/to your castle-thick walls, I must learn/to use your

wildness when I lock and unlock/your door weaker than kisses” could attach itself to the

cottage itself if not for the fact that it steers away from that imagery with beds that have minds as in the earlier passage or as the poem concludes and too, as its use of you grows warmer.

Let me have you for what we call forever, the deeper opposite of a picture, your leaves, the part of you that the sea first talked to (73.)

The you might be the reader, but with the qualifiers constantly in play it suggests too, some specific, more intimate you. A more earnest attempt at solving for you yields more questions. This is due to the fact that a single poem may make the character of the you seem to be a brother, a lover, or a child. Further, since a single poem might render the you another name for the I and with all the unique trouble the McGuckian I provides in terms of positive identification, we find ourselves without a sense of whom we might identify. This uncertainty might be emblematic of what it means to live in a postcolonial landscape with its 64 blended, overlapping, sometimes eclipsing cultural features. Feminist theory often addresses how female identity is deferred, always elsewhere. With this slippage in subjectivity,

McGuckian creates the sense of displacement that women are often subjected to, and with that same gesture creates a mimetic sense of what it might mean to live in a postcolonial moment where cultures, traditions, and boundaries are overlapping and overshadowing one another.

If imprisonment is the ultimate synonym for freedom, then mobility would be closely aligned with liberty, therefore imprisoning one's potential captor would provide, if not freedom, then a degree of security. Thus, McGuckian's metaphorical slipperiness, her ability to slip out of a poem by keeping the subject or character of the poem in a constant state of disguise or metamorphosis serves to ensnare a reader as well as to provide resistance to a unified political message, serves as a bold response to the charge that artists from a postcolonial site must directly engage those politics.

2. Weirding-Out the Objects

Then if the speaker in any work of literature is a subjective image, we might, as readers, hope to rely on the things of the world for consistency; we may hope that, for example: a window, a tree, might stand for a constant image. One might hope that these nouns of the world might provide some sense of relief from the particular brand of motion sickness that a large dose of the signature McGuckian troublings of time and place and character engender, but in these poems, such a dizzied reader would be out of luck. Recall the earlier example of a dream that is flat on both sides and note how the details which, on the surface, suggest specificity which itself is often employed to hone an image or to zero-in on its size and shape, here the use of “flat on both sides” as it pertains to the intangible noun of the dream suggests further and deliberate confusion. As Mary O’ Connor writes of 65

McGuckian’s work: "All is ambiguity and flux: a day, a novel, a house, a speaker turn into each other, so that one finds no contrast between setting and action, no background or foreground: all are part of the same complex surface. (O' Connor 183). Consider the following line: "My heart in your mouth is a tan-colored telephone that hears your near- dying voice everywhere." (McGuckian, "Shelmailer" 30) Even in one of the clearer examples,

McGuckian's speaker, location and the metaphorical connections between objects are so strange, so completely in motion throughout the line, that it resembles a combination of the world’s exterior and the body’s interior to create an emotional rather than a literal logic. So little is able to be located, even the state of dying: partial, non-localized, one might try to label that voice “Ireland” or “woman,” but the image insists through its strangeness on an insistent complexity and that complexity resists positive identification. In such a line, what holds power? Is it the you because the you carries the speaker’s heart in her/his mouth, yet that heart may also be a kind of spy heart, a virus or a traitor in the body, listening in with a lover’s intimacy. With so much imagery in the air, one is able to re-juggle and re-figure privilege, power, and information is such a way as to re-write a world with fewer of those previous and problematic connotations. Objects in this strangely re-invented world are able to be less susceptible to the gendered, political and historical boundaries that once shaded them.

3.Messing with the wristwatch

Markers of time mean little in the McGuckian poem. Like any good puzzle-maker, she is cognizant of the fact that to know the time in a given place is to be able to locate oneself in relation to other time zones. To know the “when” goes a good distance towards figuring out “where.” To know where is to be able to find oneself situated in a particular historical moment, on specific soil, as a set self. So she controls the time by keeping the 66 time out of control. She sets the watches of each poem in such a way as to eradicate any set idea of time or place. Therefore, in the truest sense, to enter into a McGuckian poem, is to enter into a dimension devised to bear no correlation to any real world as we know it. We are always not in the here and the now of the poem and we are continually reminded of our nowhereness.

In “Candles at Three-Thirty” it is as if the act of mentioning a specific time must be a satirical move as the poem continues and “the year fades without ripening,/but glitters as it withers/like an orange stuck with cloves/or Christmas clouds//then moves to a later stanza that states “when I am all but harbour, I ask too much,/go up like the land/ to points and precipices,/meanwhile is my anchor” (McGuckian 76). If the reader had once hoped that a timepiece would assist in clarifying the when of this situation (since the what and the whom are switched out at whim,) then this moment with “meanwhile as an anchor” belonging to a who has already proved adept at escaping us should extinguish any lingering hope of clarity through time’s steadying method.

Consider the following from “Pain Tells You What to Wear”: Once you have seen a crocus in the act of giving way to the night, your life no longer lives you, from now on your later is too late. Rain time and sun time, that red and gold sickness is like two hands covering your face—(McGuckian 38.)

We see an additional advantage to this technique in that it serves to empower a woman's else-whereness and deferral and turn it from a weapon into a tool, something like a superhero’s cape or lasso that lends both strength and convenient invisibility. There is a sense of security in the knowledge that one can only be found on the schedule of one's choosing. Thus, a body in peril finds that to be less locatable is to be more in control.

Postmodernism often suggests a more mimetic correlation between world--chaotic, 67 untethered--and text. The McGuckian poem then, might be said to be a poster-child of this model, especially since the poems are not so “unhinged” as to suggest that they are working within a L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry design, nor would one really suggest that they are highly experimental. Instead, like a maze or a puzzle, they embrace confusion, re-routing and digression as fuel and vehicle, as method of travel and as destination (or rather destinations).

As Peter Sirr observes: "It is hard to determine what is happening here: the poem moves with a degree of sureness that might be in inverse proportion to its interpretability." (Sirr

459). Yes, because McGuckian has laid the traps down and in so doing, she knows where they are. Her certainty of tone comes from knowing that her metaphorical limbs are safe from those textual metal jaws.

By the end of the poem “Candles at Three Thirty” McGuckian like a virtuoso of obfuscation has all of her tricks spinning simultaneously in the air of the poem. There is no clear male noun to whom to attach the “his” which marks the final line of the poem and no way to be certain that grabbing the closest noun (seagull) and assuming that that noun must be the reference. When so many liberties have been taken so often, the impression is given that anything might slip its skin—be it a bird, a speaker, a season—and become something else or simply turn a corner and evaporate. The final third of the poem has subject, object, and time refusing to stay fully where “the island with its quick primrose light/turns aside and walks away/from my swollen shadows,/but carries the road southwards.//Frail as tobacco flowers,/a featherweight seagull/still damp on my brocade curtain/is ready for the sea again.//A meaningless white thread/of pale travel-sleep/rippling one side only/of his unlighted eyes (76).

So what holds such poems together when so much of their construction is that of dismantling? Peter Sirr attributes their "unexpected connectedness between the images as 68

the imagination seems to cede control" to "mood-logic...and an endlessly metamorphosing imagination." (Sirr 257).

Sirr also states that: "Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Medbh McGuckian are two poets who are willing to cede authority over their consciousness to allow their imagination to take over." (Sirr 450). If one were to imagine birds and how statelines or borders of countries as purely conceptual constructs mean nothing, and feel like nothing to them as they fly through them, one might be able to think of the imagination of oppressed people as potential bird- like traveler, an escape artist of the most innocent kind. Undetected, this subject flies freely by whim and not in defiance or reaction or in fear, because obviously, border guards don't register birds or insects. The analogy, beyond its use as in imagistic terms, grows ludicrous

there, because the human mind is psychologically complicated and susceptible to a range of subconscious influences. The body is controlled by state and national lines, as well as numbered, monitored and subject to its location. Because of that more complicated understanding of its condition, the human imagination, even in its freest flights, flies through

the soot of politics and the ideological pollutants in the air. Therefore, under the best of

circumstance the imagination--though in motion--emerges a little stained from the struggles,

historical and political. Therefore, a poet's internalization of self-identity in relation to the

oppressive force be that force a man or a nation, remains, so that any poem written even

from these more imaginatively-mobile poets carries within it a political voice even as it never

mentions a single place-name, a single conflict. It cannot but carry them even as it carries on

seemingly without them.

The situation of Northern Ireland complicates this greatly. As Paul Muldoon

observes: “The trouble with this place (Northern Ireland) is that if you don't engage in it,

you're an ostrich, (whatever engage means). If you do engage in it, you're using it as a kind 69

of--you're on the make almost, cashing in.” (Hufstader 57).

Northern Ireland as a postcolonial site bears much more resemblance to a place in the

present throes of colonization than it does to being "post" that kind of disassembly.

Particularly, since McGuckian was born in 1950, and has witnessed the violence that more closely resembled that of war, her artistic response and responsibility is heightened. In

“Drawing Ballerinas,” McGuckian mentions how intimately the sense of political unrest and

personal domestic security were enmeshed, “Our house was on the flight-path and I would

run down to my parents screaming that there was going to be a war, a war had started, when

the drone of engines terrified me.” (McGuckian 18).

In such historical and political weather, it becomes a matter of ethics, a public charge

that an artist in some direct way contend with the politics of her native landscape. Critics

find it problematic then, when McGuckian's poems seem unable to directly address their

political subjects and stand instead as active ruins, as the kinds of linguistic practices that

disassemble and fracture and mislead or variously-lead even as we try to learn their streets.

It is for all of these reasons that I am less interested in the ways McGuckian uses

motherhood to represent Mother Ireland, first because the connections seem obvious and

second, were they otherwise, countless treatments of that subject in relation to her work are

available. I think so much has been done in this area because to focus on that secret code of

mother and mother country seems to provide one way to tame, and therefore justify her

coded language as the same type of language used by prisoners of war to communicate with

one another and with their families. This manner of writing is again a way to keep the wrong

people from understanding. That idea is compelling but I would like advance it by

suggesting that McGuckian liberates herself to (not from) an artistic agenda by running to

the center of her self-designed mazes. Only in the maze of one's own design can one feel so 70

secure. Only in such a place is one liberated by the knowledge of how she is able to

manipulate even the time of those who enter her maze. Through her knowledge of how the

maze operates, which possible turns will delay the wanderer/reader and how she has even

planted clues, dummy-selves, all manner of disorienting devices into that maze, where she

has finally, been able to clear a space for herself can she finally leave a design and leave the

design.

Beyond that, even as her work changes, even in becoming more narrative or direct,

she remains free and in control of her artistic domain having already established that she is

working on her own terms. In the opening of Captain Lavender, McGuckian selected to

feature an epigraph from Picasso's letters; "I have not painted the war....but I have no doubt

that the war is in...these paintings I have done." The warring attentions of being a woman

trying to create art in a postcolonial place are also in these poems. But it is that free-ranging

imagination of a self-permissive aesthetic freedom that allows the poem to be written on a

dreary Tuesday with babies crying and dirty dishes and that free half hour in the afternoon

where one is able to jot down notes for a poem about the frustrations and disunities in

motherhood and to know that the active near-war outside the window perhaps on that very

day or on any given day since childhood, will be in the poem because it is a swallowed

history, one that is already within the poet who, just this Tuesday afternoon really wants to

gripe (in verse) about being a mother when all she wants is a cup of tea and a few hours to

be a poet. Conflict is there, disharmony is there and the generational inheritance of coming

from two different historical moments with two separate identities is present for both

mother and child, as with Mother Ireland and the conflicted loyalties of her citizens will all be inside this poem.

Finally aesthetic consistency leads to identification and is, in that way, a potential 71 trap. Enough time with the same puzzles or traps, or enough of the same type of puzzles and traps, and one can gain a kind of cumulative knowledge that will help to finally learn how to solve them or spring out of them. The smart designer knows to continue to change techniques, trails, kinds in order to preserve and aesthetic vitality. O’Connor seconds this sentiment: “the imagination is so very vulnerable…if anyone did actually deconstruct the whole poem, the poem is dead” (185).

McGuckian is set at that place on the “accessible to obscure” dial that marks her in certain ways so that in other poems when she is more traditionally narrative, more open, then that more traditional approach is its own revolution forces us into another metamorphosis in how we read McGuckian and in the way we classify her. And although, in an interview, McGuckian claims some of her work is more directly concerned with politics and more directly tied to the world of reality, that willingness to move into another way of writing continues to be her signature source of power, mobility and escape when escape is necessary. Even within a more direct poetry she continues to design puzzles that only she can solve by continuing to change. McGuckian-as-artist then puzzles by not arriving as the expected-McGuckian to the party of her newest work. Her readers are select, selected and self-selected through the means in which they are able to enjoy the partial pleasures of comprehension through fleeting apprehension. Where an image, a subject, a set time or place once stood some/thing/one/where else might take its place. As in any textual legerdemain that results in something where it was not before, or something changed in the spot where another something stood, or a disappearance altogether of a coin, a playing card, a body, the magic is in the motion. 72

Works Cited

Hufstader, Jonathan. Tongue of Water, Teeth of Stones: Northern Irish Poetry and Social Violence. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky Press, 1999.

McGuckian, Medbh. Selected Poems. Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1997.

McGuckian, Medbh. "Drawing Ballerinas: How Being Irish Influence me as a Writer." Wee Girls. Ed. Lizz Murphy. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1996. 185-211.

McGuckian, Medbh. "Men are Trousers." Border Crossings: Irish Women and National Identities. Ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press 2000. 157-189.

McGuckian, Medbh. Shelmailer: Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1998. O'Connor, Mary. "Medbh McGuckian." Modern Irish Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Ed Alexander G. Gonzalez. Conneticut: Greenwood Press, 1997. 182-187.

Sered, Danielle. “By Escaping and [Leaving] a Mark: Authority and the Writing Subject of

Sirr, Peter. "How Things Begin to Happen: Notes on Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Medbh McGuckian." The Southern Review 1995, Volume 31. No. 3, 450-468.

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Notes

i Jeanette Winterson, The Passion. ii Czeslaw Milosz, “I Sleep A lot, (Bobo’s Metamorpheses”) iii This line belongs to the poet, Joel Brower. iv Tara Parker-Pope. “A Clutter Too Deep for Mere Bins and Shelves.” New York Times, January 1, 2008. v Directed at Zelda Fitzgerald and with Reference to Her 1920’s Dive into the Fountain of the Plaza Hotel. vi Additionally, though we have no way of knowing for certain, the longing tones of some of these conversations seem to suggest that heaven is segregated or in some way prevents Zelda from finding Scott, Anne reuniting with Kayo, Virginia with Leonard, or Ted experiencing the direct afterlife dealings of his two late-wives. This poem is a duet performed by Edna St. Vincent Millay & Sylvia Plath. vii From a similar line in the poem: “White Slip on a Paris Metro” by Eliot Khalil Wilson. viii Title Beginning with a Line by Edna St. Vincent Millay and spoken on behalf of Assia Weevil addressing Ted Hughes upon the occasion of the discontinuation of Polaroid Instamatic film. ix On February 8, 2008 Polaroid Corporation announced that it will discontinue production of the instant film that made the company a household name. x Assia Weevil is upset by the echoes in a young poet’s & her infant daughter’s death. xi From heaven Anne writes to her husband, Kayo on their anniversary. xii The term “happened balloon” coms from Sexton’s Poem “Admonishments to a Special Person” xiii Ekphrastic concatenation of Elaina’s response to reading and imagining the descent of Dickey’s flight attendant and the poems: dead-drops, astonishments of Sarah Hannah, followed by Elaina’s subsequent rumination on the nature of falling from the sky, the living, or the page. xiv James Dickey’s “Falling”, of course. xv Alludes loosely to Sexton’s “suicides are like carpenters only asking which tools, never ‘why build?” xvi Our protagonist, Elaina, attempts to explain why she often tunes the world out and tunes into the world of the late literati.