A WHOLE CANVAS GLOWING:

POEMS OF ALMA MAHLER

A Thesis

Presented to

The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Fine Arts

Kristina von Held

August, 2010

A WHOLE CANVAS GLOWING:

POEMS OF ALMA MAHLER

Kristina von Held

Thesis

Approved: Accepted:

______Thesis Advisor Department Chair Dr. Mary Biddinger Dr. Michael Schuldiner

______Committee Member Dean of the College Maggie Anderson Dr. Chand Midha

______Committee Member Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Craig Paulenich Dr. George R. Newkome

______Date

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

PREFACE ...... vii

Prelude: Receptions ...... 1

SECTION I: ON THE RUNWAY OF HISTORY ...... 3

Encountering Alma ...... 4

Alma’s Origins ...... 7

He wraps me up ...... 8

My Jewish Trio ...... 9

Frau Mahler as Mrs. D ...... 10

At the Opera: Liebestod ...... 11

Alma’s Last Waltz ...... 12

My Music as Yours ...... 14

Artists’ Wives ...... 15

Playing My Part, Summer 1902 ...... 16

At the Opera: Mother, Villainess ...... 17

Summer at Maiernigg ...... 18

His Favorite Child ...... 19

Kindertotenlied I: List of My Vanished Offspring ...... 20

Gute Nacht, Herr Architekt ...... 21

Freud and Leyden ...... 23

iii If I Had Gone to Leyden ...... 24

It Is Hard ...... 25

I Invite the Russian Pianist ...... 26

Dancing in Cleveland, 1911 ...... 27

Reminiscence ...... 28

Interlude: Our Composers, Ourselves ...... 29

SECTION II: DEGENERATING INTO ART ...... 30

Alma Takes Me to Vienna ...... 31

After Mahler...... 32

Advice in the Old Country ...... 33

At the Opera: Rosenkavalier – Vienna’s Revenge ...... 34

Object of Obsession ...... 35

I Knew Better Than to Marry Him ...... 36

Oskar Alma Kokoschka ...... 37

Oskar: My Alma ...... 38

At the Opera: Conversation with a Doll ...... 41

Alma’s Ansturm ...... 42

Alma at the Ballet Russe ...... 43

Walter Gropius Takes Alma to Berlin ...... 44

Walter’s Wedding Gift: a Painting by Munch ...... 45

At the Opera: Fin-de-siècle femme fatale ...... 46

Klimt’s Water Nymphs ...... 47

Otto Weininger Bemoans His Feminine Age ...... 48

iv My Third Little Jew, Vienna 1918 ...... 49

Kindertotenlied II: They Don’t Belong to Us ...... 51

Anna Mahler: In My Mother’s World ...... 52

Resurrecting My Dead Daughter ...... 53

Alma Imagines Her Descent ...... 54

The Secret Life of Water ...... 55

That Moment ...... 56

In Response to Tom Lehrer...... 57

SECTION III: IM EXIL ...... 58

Closing In ...... 59

Through the Night Sky...... 61

Aboard the New Hellas, 1940 ...... 62

Ways to Water the Garden, Beverly Hills 1942 ...... 63

Im Exil 1945: Alma’s L.A. Elegy ...... 64

Alma Hears Voices on the Elevator ...... 66

Contemplating the Limpet Life ...... 67

Visit to Vienna, June 1946 ...... 68

Alma’s Lunar Eclipse ...... 69

Wishcraft: a home-remedy ...... 70

Alma Goes Fishing ...... 71

In the Bilingual Torture Chamber ...... 72

Kindertotenlied III: From Alma’s Album...... 73

Miss Alma Would Rather Be Dancing ...... 75

v Alma Calls on Ophelia ...... 77

Alma in March ...... 78

Alma instructs herself in home-remedy euthanasia ...... 80

Postlude: Litany for Alma ...... 81

END NOTES ...... 83

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 88

vvii PREFACE

This book of poems takes its inspiration from the life and legacy of Alma Mahler-

Werfel. In fact, most of the poems are written in her voice, hence the somewhat deceptive subtitle “Poems of Alma Mahler.” Alma herself did take up the pen and write, but she wrote memoir and revised, rather liberally, the correspondence of her dead husbands, thus bringing to its written conclusion her role as the helpmate and muse of great male artists.

Even in this secondary role, Alma inspired songs, novels, and plays, and multiple biographers and scholars have researched her life in great depth, each emerging with a different focus on her life. Francoise Giroud, for example, presents Alma as a proto- feminist whose creativity found its expression in the subtitle of this biography, “The Art of Being Loved.” And even though, in Giroud’s eyes, attracting the love of artists might be its own reward, Alma herself was fully aware of starting down this path with the sacrifice of her music for that of her husband.

Why she never returned to music after the ten-year marriage came to its end

remains a mystery. Was it just her love of society and parties, as her composition teacher

had suggested? In spite of the supposed “femininity” of Viennese fin-de-siècle culture,

and the battles that were waged on it within art, there were few, if any female artists

known to contemporary women. Even women supporting each other in their creative

desires, such as the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, whose letter became the

vii basis of Adrienne Rich’s poem "Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff," were forging new ground and quickly called back into the fold of their bourgeois home and hearth.

The Alma voiced here started out as the historical Alma (see notes), but has metamorphosed into a strange double of myself, a poet’s dummy that helps me enter a time far away and fully out of my reach. The poetic space I create for Alma is not one I would place myself in, and her life allows me to voice impressions I might not utter in regard to anyone else. So these poems also serve to create a sort of dialogue between two women across the boundaries of time and class. The creative expression she was denied or denied herself strikes at the core of my own anxieties in ways I cannot articulate without her.

I also could not have completed this project without the help of the poets who served on my committee. Maggie Anderson inspired the conception of this project, which grew out of my work on female heroines in opera. Her patience and encouragement during the initial phase were invaluable and happened during the Bisbee fellowship of the

NEOMFA program during the summer of 2008. The hospitality of Robert and Estellean

Wick and the breathtaking setting of their house in the Southeast Arizona desert, propelled me through the difficult transition from historical materials to poetic text.

During the second phase of the project, Craig Paulenich’s graduate class on the poetic caper and our stimulating discussions helped Alma to shed even more of her biographical constrictions. Even though much of the wonderful feedback I received from him and classmates in the course did not find its way into a poem, the kind of freedom they suggested reignited my desire to continue the project and to see whether it had enough momentum to grow into a book-length manuscript.

viii Last but not least, my advisor Mary Biddinger inspired and encouraged me to let

Alma leap from her life in ways I had not allowed her to do before. Mary’s enthusiasm for this project and tireless support were invaluable to let me encounter and imagine

Alma in a new light, one that does not deny my own experience and realities as an immigrant in present-day America, but, even more so, one that allowed me all the freedom of imagination I desired.

ix Prelude: Receptions

She was the worst human being I have known. (writer Gina Kaus)

Whoever has Alma for a wife, must die. (Claire Goll)

She was a great lady and, at the same time, a sewer. (Alma’s friend Marietta Torberg)

One of the most eccentric, most feminine, and most intelligent women of her time, a personality of such complex nature that she became a symbolic figure in the history of this century. (biographer Berndt Wesseling)

Either you compose or you go in society – one or the other. You better choose what suits you more – go to parties. (composition teacher and early love interest Alexander von Zemlinsky)

Alex – my Alex. I want to be your consecration bowl. Pour your excess into me. (Alma’s diary, September 24, 1901)

How do you imagine a composing couple? Do you have any idea how ridiculous, and later demeaning for ourselves, such a curious rivalry must be? How would it be if you happen to feel like composing, but have to take care of the house for me or get other things I happen to need, when you, as you write, are supposed to take over the mundane every day requirements from me? – But that you have to become what I need, if we are supposed to be happy, my wife and not my colleague – that is certain! (letter from Gustav Mahler, December 19, 1901)

He thinks nothing of my art – much of his own – and I think nothing of his art and much of my own. That’s how it is! Now he constantly speaks of the protecting of his art. I cannot do that. With Zemlinsky it would have worked, since I feel his art – he is a genius of a guy. (Alma’s diary, December 19, 1901)

Now I will have to wander to the end of the universe with a people that are not my kind – and yet I cannot help but watch with greatest admiration Adolf Hitler, this heroic human being, how he marches victoriously across humanity. … A real Germanic apparition of a fanaticist as it would be unthinkable among Jews. (Alma in French exile, 1938)

Alma was the first one to appear on the landing, fresh as ever, with blowing white travel veil and bursting with anti-Semitism. She had arranged with the captain to exit earlier. One of her first utterances, after setting foot on soil, came to my ear: “Tomorrow come to my hotel room, not later than six; there will be a few important people, but don’t tell all the Jews.” She is no different from the way she used to be. She is terrific. Unpredictable. (Carl Zuckmayer on Alma’s arrival in the New York, 1940)

1

In order to refresh her waning charms, she wore gigantic hats with ostrich feathers; one didn’t know whether she wished to appear as mourning horse in front of a hearse or as new d’Artagnan. In addition she was powdered, painted, perfumed and completely drunk. This macerated valkyrie drank like a hole. (Claire Goll in her memoirs)

After Werfel’s death, she told me in her house in Beverly Hills that she had ordered her servant to read Nietzsche and Shakespeare. I smiled imagining that. August, her servant, had been an operetta tenor of a traveling vaudeville group, before they went bankrupt. She shook her head and said: “I simply cannot live under the same roof with someone who does not create.” (manuscript of her son-in-law, Albrecht Joseph)

When I was young I saw myself as one of the first great women composers. But then I also began to realize the tremendous impression I could make on men, what an important role I could play in some of their lives, becoming literally the creator of creators. … At any rate it’s nice to think I might have been that great artist I was not. (Alma in conversation with Walter Sorell, New York, 1960s)

She was married three times. Wed she was only once. Wed she was to her life. To her own life. (Soma Morgenstern at Alma’s funeral)

2

SECTION I:

ON THE RUNWAY OF HISTORY

3 Encountering Alma

From a square in the wall leaps another year. You are stuck in this life, in this city, surviving them all.

***

I make you up from the lines of a few songs you wove: I wander among flowers and blossom myself along.

***

Through the fog of a hundred years you wave a message: Read me. Write me down.

***

So I make you up, dress you in whalebone, rustling silk and feather.

Women without makeup cannot be trusted.

***

The fabric of our encounter – cloth, paper, sound – tears into fragments.

***

Your sister Grete murdered in a Nazi camp, her mind in pieces.

Don’t worry, your mother’s secret of Grete’s father

4 is safe with me.

Her infidelity: yours: your daughter’s.

***

I watch you take shape.

Everything that passed through her hands must be regarded as tainted, the scholars write.

I wish I could see your hands.

***

I asked her to hold my breath while I went under. We practiced

the dead man’s float, butterfly stroke. Listened to water tangling our hair.

***

The piano is sprouting: daffodil, lily, hyacinth.

If it were not so silent, we would hear Schumann, Im wunderschönen Monat Mai.

When art and love do not keep their promises, where do we turn?

***

Always on the verge of silence. On the pedestal: only silence. After the pedestal: more silence.

***

Dead women flaunt themselves on the runway of history. Leaking from lips, nose, pores,

5 their skin stretched into parchment.

***

You rewrite history, but only the details. You are your husbands’ first faithful scholar.

***

I dive into the darkness below, wave my way through water and kelp, while my lungs fill with your world.

6 Alma’s Origins

I see the universe of her, the flesh on her ribs, cheeks to soften pointed chin, nose, those

Aryan eyes, violet pools for artistic narcissists, an impenetrable mirror, surface hardened to stone above her bones at Grinzing Friedhof, where she lies reunited with the soil that created her, Vienna – city with its air of decay, of artists that sprung up like vinca, clung to her, smothered the music inside her, remade this girl in melody and paint: shaped soul, helpmate, muse.

7 He wraps me up in gold, a whole canvas glowing. I brighten into Judith, fin-de-siècle femme fatale, stroking the severed head with slender wrist, pearls luring between my lips, rich bounty to the hunter I face under halo of darkness.

Eyes half-closed, I call visitors to the wall, where I am leashed to the cage of his canvas, gilded to the four corners. I am beheaded by gold.

Into Danae, ripening leaf ornament, thick thighs open to the gold, raining illumination.

Into Pallas Athene, goddess of war, breast plated, the Secession’s protectress, golden armadillo, display on a museum wall.

8 My Jewish Trio In the Jew and the woman, good and evil are not distinct from one another. (Otto Weininger, Sex and Character)

I say who is a Jew. (Karl Lueger, Mayor of Vienna 1897-1910) A friend of my dead father gives me Nietzsche, teaches me about the purity of my race. I go out, find myself a string of Jews.

The first one is chinless, eyes bulging, the teacher of a new generation. He wants me to stay away from society, focus on my music. We kiss and work and kiss some more, until our teeth hurt. He loves my songs, pushes me toward myself, but I want more than myself. So I torture him, fling myself into the arms of the famous conductor.

Herr Hofoperndirektor is small, much older like my father, more catholic than I. He requires sacrifice of “my little musical obsession,” wants nothing but a wife. Under his baton our life spirals into tightening circles. When he returns for lunch, he rings the bell, so the soup is on the table as he enters. His early death renders me a merry widow, well-off and desirable.

My third Jew is younger, small and round, his tenor voice beautiful like Papi’s, but he sneaks off at night, smokes and drinks away his gifts. I must be muse and dominatrix, whip him to his desk, where I create a novelist out of this Kaffeehaus poet. Though I blame the death of our son on his bad seed, I follow him to Hollywood, leave my Vienna to uniformed hordes.

9 Frau Mahler as Mrs. D.

after Virginia Woolf

Having gone to the opera—for how many years now? over ten,—one is overcome even on the balcony among the audience, or walking up the stairs, Alma was certain, by a sudden rush, or gravity; an ineffable widening; an awe (of course it could be her head, pickled, she thought, by too much champagne) before the curtain rises. Now! Up it went. First a sound, mechanical; then the lifting, inevitable. The red velvet disappeared into the proscenium arch. So alive we are, she thought, crossing her hands. Who is to say why I am so moved by it, how I absorb it, consuming it, stacking it around myself, breathing it, drinking in every note like new; even the little shop girls, mistressed out to wealthy men sitting among us (lifted momentarily) are part of it; can’t be excluded, she knew well, by contemptuous glances during intermission because they too love music. In everyone’s ears, in the drums, sound, and song; in the air and the aria; the lungs, tongues, palates, lips, the stage hollowing and luring; thick brass; nourishing strings; the velvet and the winding and the unearthly high notes of some sopranos on stage was what she lived for; music; Vienna; this night at the opera.

10 At the Opera: Liebestod

I find the subject so miserable; a love madness, induced by a potion, can one still be interested in the lovers in such a case? These are not emotions, this is sickness, they literally tear each other’s hearts out, and the music sensualizes this in the most disgusting sounds! (Clara Schumann)

In opera to love is to wish to die. (Catherine Clément)

Love-death in German, which could mean death by love, or love due to it, or perhaps the death of love all together. Or is it really death by music, tonality slithering to its inevitable end, holding hands with what is to come (for one long evening at the opera)?

Death by singing too much Wagner possibly, singing one’s way through three acts, stormy seas in the first one, then dark forest and finally windswept moor, where Isolde arrives to cure Tristan.

Not to cure him of love (that would have been the humane thing to do), but to incite him to it, tear the bandages off his own wounds, raise his body to her one last time.

Isolde, foreigner from the far-away island in the sea, tried to poison Tristan, die with him (why not?), but only slowed down their inevitable end (by two more acts exactly).

When tonality breaks apart, love isn’t far behind, (and decent romantic composers, like Clara, are outraged). We sing ourselves into love, then into death, while music holds us tightly, squeezes us through its chromatic tunnels, through a murky sea of lush chords.

In the end, Ireland’s daughter, loving and wild, is left sinking onto her sad lover’s body, singing, like Wagner’s orchestra, herself into death.

11 Alma’s Last Waltz

I wrote a piece last night (it better not be my last), hear Gustav work on a song; he hates it when I compose.

I fear it was my last. The piano sits in the corner. He hates it when I write. I promised to be just his.

In the corner sits the piano, daunting monster in black. I promised to be all his: no more music from these keys!

The shining monster in black used to yield to me. No more music from its keys. My fingers are growing stiff.

I used to wield it well, this instrument of men. My fingers are now stiff, my voice is broken down.

I’m instrument of men – I didn’t worry much that my voice was breaking down singing Wagner all day.

I didn’t think it was much when I composed some songs. But Tristan is so strange… how does one beat such art?

When I wrote little songs I only tried to please, never meant to create art that topples what has been.

I only tried to please and while away my days, not shatter what has been, form language that is new.

12

I whiled away my days with Alex teaching me the language of the new century’s assault.

But Alex and his work were foreign scroll to Gustl. The century’s approach made him retrace what’s old: dismiss the foreign scale, its breaking down of sound. He went back to the old, long symphonies and songs.

The breaking point of sound tormented his simple world, the symphonies, the songs he wrote again and again.

What threatened his old world was women who compose. Determined and cold he wrote a letter that forbade his budding wife to compete with his artistic drive. When he proposed he forbade me to write another note.

With no drive of my own I composed a waltz last night, won’t write another note, just hear him work on old songs.

13 My Music as Yours too Schubertian, …, too Viennese, too Slav. (Claude Debussy) Always ten steps ahead, Gustav cannot stand still. He burns to shape man and his world, voices intimate amidst thunder. Life’s chaos, its beauty, and death’s necessity.

Like Adam, he names to contain the threat of dissolution, dissonance of the real. Each theme a lamp in the dark, each movement a day of creation. Each symphony a universe that spins world out of song, that prolongs the dominant, stretches the symphony, fragments its worn story.

I don’t care much for it: the folk songs he is so fond of, echoes of military brass. Time to move beyond childhood music. I embrace the new sound that is seeping into Vienna, but my husband scales the mountain of the past.

14 Almost Vanished

Rodin’s Rose, Monet’s Camille, Cézanne’s Hortense, claim visibility in perfect silence:

Rose at thirty-six: a small mask, eyes cast down, one brow slanted, the other a tilde, on the tip of her nose a smudge. Preserving his clay women under wet towels.

Camille Monet on a Garden Bench became The Bench, elegant in gray-and-black, wide eyes, down-turned lips, blankly gazing at us, a sinister-looking man hunched over her shoulder.

Hortense in a blue dress, seated in a sunny room splashed in yellows and ochre; two symmetrical lines above a sculpted nose; a pile of brown hair shaped into a smooth cap atop her head.

Would Rose have preferred to live with a railroad worker who came home for dinner every night?

What if Camille had been married to a department store owner who would give her all the dresses she wanted?

Another man might not have nicknamed Hortense la boule, the ball and chain on his life.

One advantage to sacrificing your life to a painter: stare back from canvas at throngs of people shuffling by.

15 Playing My Part, Summer 1902

Now that I am getting rounder people notice me. They want this child. They never wanted my songs.

I am suddenly solid, substantive, fill the body of wife, fit in this life by his side. His Almschi. No longer lost in song, but found in this rounding.

I draw from my body one chord: the sound of woman full. Cells sprout divide, take shape. I am ancient law.

I sit under the chestnut tree in the garden, lean against its rough bark and watch the balloon in my lap with amazed terror.

Who is blowing through me?

16 At the Opera: Mother, Villainess

Cloaked in marvels of darkness, the Queen of the Night floats on a cloud from fly loft to stage. Her language terrifying, untenable tessitura, meaningless syllables.

We know by act II that she is the madwoman who must be contained. She is out of options, rage boiling through her heart: torn to pieces in constant staccato coloratura, hysterical swirlings. The mother’s only answer: acrobatic screaming. This Queen will lose, not just her daughter, but all power, to Sarastro’s basso profundo, the sound of reason. We learn that a woman talks a lot and knows nothing, is nothing but instrument.

Mozart’s fairy tale grinds the mother’s voice to fragments beneath the stones of the father’s temple. The daughter left alone in the world of men.

17 Summer at Maiernigg

I sit down at the piano dying to play, but notes no longer call on me. The black monster stares unmoved, its polished wing showing me the most beautiful girl in Vienna. Music hovers behind the words I speak. I cannot listen long enough to catch it.

Gustav spends all morning in his composing hut. I keep silent, copy his scores, bribe neighbors to lock barking dogs away, so he can capture me as theme.

I dream of a green reptile, a lizard with long legs, forcing its way inside me. I cannot tear it out, call for the maid to help. We pull with all our strength, but the beast holds my organs in its thick jaw, hollows me out.

18 His Favorite Child

Only our Putzi is allowed to visit Gustav in the hut, has his dark hair, high forehead, eyes with questions. I have no idea what they talk about, but she returns happy, face smeared with jam.

When Putzi fights for her life, Gustav leaves me with the doctor who opens her throat on our dining room table. I hold her squealing body, force the mask into a terrified face.

She suffers another day, then is gone. Gustav, lost to silence, never permits to mention her name. Poor Gucki thinks she made her sister die.

I blame myself, should not have given in before we were married. I also blame him, obsessed with death, those dreadful songs he wrote about children.

Suddenly I am back on Sylt where Papi died. I catch a glimpse of his bloated body, grinding into sheets like a worm. We were on a holiday by the sea, returned to Vienna with a corpse.

19 Kindertotenlied I: List of My Vanished Offspring

Oft denk ich sie sind nur ausgegangen. (Kindertotenlieder, no.4)

Putzi, Gustav’s favorite – dead at five, her blue eyes wiped from our summer by diphtheria.

Oskar’s child – never born, a private affair, handled at a clinic, triggering mad outbursts by him.

The boy, Martin – forced out too soon, sick all ten months of his short existence, depraved seed.

Manon, my Aryan angel – almost grown, dead of sudden polio, her name scratched into a score.

20 Gute Nacht, Herr Architekt What I would like most would be a harem, and not to be disturbed. (Arthur Schnitzler) I

We do not grieve Putzi, show no pain, wear no black according to Gustav’s rules. I recover at Tobelbad spa uncorseted, barely covered by a shapeless nightgown. We exercise in open air, bathe in bubbling slime. The doctor recommends the dancing cure, prescribes a young architect as partner.

While taking the waters, I take to Walter. For six weeks we waltz over hilltops, my nightgown billowing. At the end of a long night, we consume raw carrots, drink mineral water to strengthen our resolve for another afternoon of tango and tea.

II

Gustav finds one of his letters, confronts me, but I counter: seven years of submission, of solitude by his side. One night Walter lurks under a bridge, asks my husband to set me loose. Gustav leaves us alone, and I realize the architect is a nobody, his “art” all function.

I send Walter away, but continue to write. Mami comforts Gustav while she passes my love notes to Walter. We rendezvous

21 on the Orient Express, Munich to Paris. I envision the Aryan demi-god we might create: His mind, my body… no, that was with Gustav.

I get used to one man for art, another for bed – what more does a woman need?

22 Freud and Leyden

One trembling genius takes the train to the other. They stroll along the Leyden canals, delve into the old question: What does woman want?

The doctor’s answer, her father, revives my husband. My second name Maria, also that of his mother, corroborates Freud’s theory of incestuous desire.

Gustav would have liked me to be more marked by suffering, like his ill and care-worn mother. His sudden interest in my songs too late to revive these galvanized corpses.

Now he is all perverted adoration, my sick, wonderful child, his mother fixation revealed as if we had sunk a single deep shaft through a mysterious building.

I never made much of the doctor. In fact, think he is an idiot. Sending me his bill over a year later, after Gustav is already gone. What kind of housekeeping is that?

23 If I Had Gone to Leyden

I would have walked the canals with him, strolled the city on a sunny afternoon, smoked a cigar, smiled my Sunday best.

Or better yet: I would have climbed the stairs to his vacation flat, spread my flesh onto the couch, followed his lead.

He would have peeled off layer after layer of debris, stripped me of all decency and decorum.

In that cultural dressing, we make up the story of our life, spin cause from prickling shame, erect nothing but hard monument to ourselves, gather the pieces into a mosaic of must.

You must be a good girl, must be silent, obedient, accommodating, a shoulder to cry on, a field to fertilize, hands busy to conquer the daily dirt and duress, to tie the small into neat packages.

They call it the talking cure. Oh, I would have told all, the great genius who squeezes his life into the tight pocket of habit, desires no company but that of wife and child during meals.

I would have spoken of dreams, those monsters that devour my insides at night, after my husband has visited my bed in the dark, then retreats into his own, leaving me with nothing but his seed, my thoughts clamoring.

I would have told him about hysteria, how the dull lives of wives locked in search for a path to the outside world, a canal with destination, a cigar that tastes of tomorrow, a smile that is good enough for every day.

24 It Is Hard

To take up space in this world, fill the contours of my plump body with myself, the being of me, some essence I do not understand.

To fill this endless stream of lines with notes, their black-and-white abstraction, brought to life by someone willing to play.

To hear Frances Alda revive one of my little corpses at Carnegie Hall, give in to display, lustless, later fill my blood with thick Benedictine.

To make the sweet liquid chase away faces of the dead that visit me, while I tenant the sofa corner and listen to Gustav lecture.

25 I Invite the Russian Pianist

We open the instrument and he plays my favorite Intermezzo by Brahms while my husband sleeps next door.

He looks like a Kiev Jew after a pogrom with fingers as long as strings, held by a master from an invisible world.

Sipping French liqueur, I watch his body lean into the sound he spins. In A Major he weds himself to me as he forgets my husband.

The weight of his young body pushes off the keys at each cadence, inviting me to fill the silence with moist sighs.

I stare at his back, chew a waffle. When he kneels in confession, I waver between drowsiness and want.

Around us air is stiffening into grid. Without the sound he dipped me in I choose a restful night in bed.

26 Dancing in Cleveland, 1911

Polish saints rise from pedestals, caught in an updraft of Haydn’s presto.

The wit and lightness of the music moves their feet in dainty steps. Rococo infiltrates Gothic space, forced to reverberate seconds, sucked into hollow darkness that dulls facile sixteenths.

Yet metronomic beat keeps the saints in sync, their golden robes floating about them, waving like sound, arcing up to pointed ceiling chambers, the pale, blue spaciousness.

These somber saints dance to this Austrian confection, spread their lifted arms, conduct a sea of cloth before returning to their appointed places on the main-nave columns.

Meanwhile a soft rain grays the streets of Slavic Village.

27 Reminiscence

I am wearing a long dress and a big hat, all in black and white—no need to abandon elegance in nature. I look huge next to slender, wiry Gustav in his cap and summer suit, always two steps ahead until we learned about his heart. People talked about his physique with disdain, but I found him handsome. Small, yes, but his face the withered side of a mountain.

The photo of him sitting: high forehead, philosophical, framed by receding, black hair. His dark eyes penetrating and deep, piercing to your very core, yet removed to another world where none of us could follow. He saw right through me, registered me more as abstraction than as flesh-and-blood woman: I was his Almschi, but not myself.

28 Interlude: Our Composers, Ourselves

Let’s find ourselves some female composers: Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Clara Wieck-Schumann, Alma Schindler-Mahler-Gropius-Werfel.

Which man should we link them to? The name of the father gives way to a husband.

Let’s be friends instead, call them Fanny, Clara, Alma. Women amongst themselves, taking to each other’s breast, a happy feminist bonanza of Our Composers, Ourselves. Busenfreundinnen in need of each other to sharpen the pen, invite the muse, seduce her with an empty womb. Crop her locks, turn her sister, bitch gone butch.

When we hear Schumann we think Robert. When we write Mahler, we mean Gustav. Some call her Schindler-Mahler, some Mahler-Werfel. For years she was Mahler-Gropius. Her lover, wanting to make her his, called her Alma Oskar Kokoschka.

29

SECTION II:

DEGENERATING INTO ART

30 Alma Takes Me to Vienna

She picks me up at West Station. Never have I traveled this far east, farther than Munich, Dresden, Prague.

Satin sleeves open as she reaches for my fingers. Her language tilts, spins its words into song.

Her vowels undulate like layers of a spread skirt that is this place. She leads me to the Danube, water hemmed in by city.

I never left Vienna, she lies, ambling along the river’s winding seam. But I know she deserted her home.

Many times, she embarked in Cherbourg, crossed the Atlantic, Gustav paling on the upper deck, peeling away from her.

Her famous eyes read through me. I never loved him or his music, she murmurs. He rendered me inaudible.

I dream in your language, I offer. My language is dead, she replies. A boat of Sunday revelers pulls in.

People stream past us, promenade along the water’s curve. I wonder how far her songs would have carried her.

Why did she give up her music for men? I want to ask her, here by the Danube, but the river pushes east,

sweeps us into the Black Sea: two women on its bank, riffraff carried away.

31 After Mahler Any genius is the right straw for me to clutch at, the right prey to feather my nest! (Alma Mahler) is in the ground, I acquire a rising scientist and amateur musician, ardent lover of my dead husband.

I become his lab assistant, slice open midwife toads, gather their eggs, but he loves his wife more than me.

Dressed in gold lamé, I start a salon in my red music room, lure Vienna’s artists. My smile nurtures new ideas and mustaches.

Gucki rides their legs: Will you be my Papi now? She searches for men with my hungry eyes, will later marry five.

Lili Leiser appears by my side, waiting, hoping. We travel to Paris, Holland. My new lover, Oskar Kokoschka, writes jealous letters, demands marriage.

I want to hide in her persistent softness, but he parades in front of my house at night. When I request a masterpiece, he delivers Windsbraut.

Lili vanishes as quietly as she came. I am like Alban’s Lulu, who will travel to London with the Countess, die in her arms, opened by the Ripper, as the curtain descends.

32 Advice in the Old Country Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral. (Bertolt Brecht)

When Oskar promised me the blue from the sky, I knew it was time to bite the sour apple.

Sour makes merry after all, and fruit suffers when it falls, feeds only maggots, its sweetness undone. All good comes from above, and morals after the frenzy.

If I throw my rifle into the corn, I may lose the only means of self-defense, lay myself open to beggars, choosers, the whole world out to chew me to pieces. His lies have short legs, and I must beat love out of my head. Why do they say

All good things come in threes? He and I and she made merry under a sour tree.

33 At the Opera: Rosenkavalier – Vienna’s Revenge

Two sopranos awake in a four-post-bed satin sheets, ruffled pillows, the older barely thirty, but that is old in Vienna. It is the beginning of the opera, and she recalls frightening dreams.

The mezzo-soprano slides from the bed into her breeches, hips wide, voice unmistakably feminine. She is Octavian, the Rosenkavalier, a pants role that will bring her new love, another teenager, who will let her forget this bed.

Three sopranos sing at the end of the opera; two new young lovers, and the third one, who has to give up on love, in God’s name, with one last major seventh, the descending ja ja, her interval of graceful resignation, Viennese style.

34 Object of Obsession

At first, I enjoyed Oskar loving, then painting me, and right back to exploring every crevice of flesh. My hair undone, corset loose, I wanted to be handled, appraised for my artistic merits, felt less massive in his huge, red hands.

Lying naked in his studio, head cradled in languorous arm, I was the center of his universe. Why do you only paint Mami? Gucki asked. He grinned, kept scratching thick brush across canvas, touching me with every stroke.

35 I Knew Better Than to Marry Him

When Oskar’s mother came by, threatening to shoot me, I almost gave him up.

Instead I demanded he prove himself to me a creator of great works.

In return, he told me what to wear, to keep wrists and neck covered in cloth.

His fresco for the fireplace: Alma, rising to paradise, leaves him amid serpents.

We fought over Mahler’s death-mask, and I had his seed scraped from me.

I was aided by the war. He bought a horse, joined the cavalry, was gone.

Upon news of his death, I went to the studio, collected my letters, a few drawings, and never looked back.

36 Oskar Alma Kokoschka

His winter of biscuits and tea. Berlin under shivering blankets and evenings at Café des Westens.

Another groschen for gas, for one more hour of light. An ox-bone dripping blood to nourish him at the ball.

He longs to crawl back to Vienna, its sing-song vowels and liquids: Großer Brauner, Mokka, Melange.

A city he can scandalize with his repulsive plague-sores, phantoms of a morbid youth. A young widow wants company, plays Liebestod and model, readies herself for battle: no more artist’s wife.

An ill-bred, stubborn child sits in the palm of her hand. Demands to be enfolded in whipped cream.

37 Oskar: My Alma …über schwarze Klippen Stürzt todestrunken Die glühende Windsbraut… (Georg Trakl, 1913) I

My blue belle, you blaze in, pull hat from hair, undo rows of tiny buttons on boots, dress, chemise, unraveling yourself for me on the chaise longue.

I paint only you, my blue girl. Oh, Frau in Blau, come smother my blues. I drip paint into your midnight, blind you to all others, expose you as my nude:

cobalt skin of breast with veins of silver filigree. No longer Gustav’s gold, I paste you in blue. Your face in every painting, my own half.

I am your new Maler, your master. My AH strong enough to stand on its own, I vowel a whole syllable. Mahler is dead, but you feast on his fame.

Our child will have death in its veins, a dead man’s face stuck to a tiny skull. I create us as Doppelakt and deliver the masterwork you demand from each man.

In Windsbraut I cradle you in blue, while we drift through the sea of Trakl’s glowing glacier. Paint sloshing around us in violent circles.

I draw love letters on fans, want your fingers to unfold our story: my sketch in ink. Both of us nude,

38 glued to each other’s trunk, treasure-drunk.

My sea-green sphinx, I etch you on my hip where you will live, ribbed part of me, fleshed out in ultramarine, my lapis lazuli queen, only sun to my teetering orbit.

I swirl around you, press thumbs into thighs, liquefy bones, stretch limbs onto the frame of this room, a skeletal studio, drenched in paint fumes and pheromones. On this canvas I own you.

You broke my blues, woman of cyan sighs, cerulean thighs. My morning glory, filled with early light. My sun, my cornflower star, bursting in blue in the wheat field of my glowing youth,

Easel-bound, I color you indigo slur across my gesso square; scare my blue-blood mare with unbridled canvas. drop water and oil down my lap; stroke our manic affair.

I take you whole, snatch silver song from lips, inhale your poison, hyacinth. I drown in your purple blood, your layers of oil. With the scraper I scar you, my whore, my only goddess.

My blue-period broad, I scumble you with stiff brush, overlay your skin with opaque, etch your contours all over my skin, glaze your cheeks with blue glass pallor, carve you, name into my skull.

39 II

Mutter shows up at Alma’s door waving a pistol; my bourgeois bride bristles. They call me Oberwildling. I am the original Bürgerschreck, degenerate artist, terror to their groomed lives.

Nothing Prussian about this tart, my sweet Viennese confection. Yet she stabs our boy in the womb, steals her letters from my studio and heads for another, while I breathe tear gas in France.

I turn her into a doll, built to my instructions: skin of feather and velvet, her hips sewn into shape; my Almi’s flesh reborn on the divan; like her without cover under the skirt.

I dress her soft plume in silk, paint her all week. By Sunday I am done with all false likeness and doll’s play, douse her in red wine, decapitate her, then throw the face into the garden below.

40 At the Opera: Conversation with a Doll

You appear to be a real woman: cleavage and curls, lips and lashes.

Deluded by magic glasses, the poet Hoffmann falls hard for your hourglass shape, your clockwork voice.

You sing a string of adorable pearls, an aria of birds, a young girl in love: La chanson d'Olympia.

Every time you wind down, you pick yourself up, a coloratura race to the top: E flat – Ah!

The deceived poet considers himself serenaded, wraps his arm around your cinched waist.

He leads you to dance, ignoring all warnings by his friend: a doll, she is a doll.

Men are fooled easily. The romantic realizes you are nothing but an automaton. He will search for love elsewhere.

Your creator tears you to shreds over money, leaves you behind in parts: wheels, screws, and broken thread.

41 Alma’s Ansturm O zürne nicht, wenn mein Begehren dunkel aus seinen Grenzen bricht, soll es uns selber nicht verzehren, muß es heraus ans Licht! (“Ansturm” by Richard Dehmel)

I take a man’s poem, but give it to a woman’s voice, pour her longing through his words into my melody. I take his desire, make it mine.

In his poem, a man cries eros, but I give him a sound of my own. With him I rehearse a new role, my lines spilling beyond the staff, off the page.

Alex writes a song to the same words. He closes his, while mine dangles, opens at the end a hole through which to reenter the space of my sound, a re-sounding.

I refuse to close my song as the poet did, assuring himself, You tremble, but are not angry with me. My music makes the voice hover among keys, the fingers meander.

42 Alma at the Ballet Russe This line…is nothing other than the path taken by the soul of the dancer. (Heinrich von Kleist) Nijinsky, god of unnatural grace, Diaghilev’s star, then lover, you intoxicate all of Paris. When the curtain lifts, we glue our gaze to your leap. We sear you, animal unbound, steer you with nothing but uplift. Your body our puppet.

Grand jeté en attitude, pirouette en arabesque. Pas de chat. You inhabit our dreams with this labor of lifting: a production of grace. Tour de force en l’air. Gossamer aerialist, we will you onto this path across the sky.

The sound of your grand sissone brushes our ears. Legs splayed, you write on air, a continuous calligraphy that marks the curve you travel every night. Dangling from our fingers, you transform into Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Debussy’s faun, masturbating into the scarf of a nymph.

Your display offends, rallies bourgeois taste against you, the modern poses and angular rites. No wonder your path will soon end in asylums. You come to rest in Montmartre only after an examiner slices open your feet to find their secret rising from the flesh.

43 Walter Gropius Takes Alma to Berlin

At the train station hats push up the stairs. The subway rattles to a stop: Nollendorfplatz.

Who else will be there? she asks. His Prussian mother waits for the Austrian slut by the piano in her parlor while eel soup steams up the kitchen windows.

She wants to smooth skin against sheets, across his renderings: translucent bond, mylar, vellum.

They walk on wide sidewalks, cobble-stoned, his determined knuckles pressing through her linen sleeve, steering her by the elbow.

His buildings will turn to hawks, delight Nazi aesthetes and their willing executioners.

They are allies, like their countries, at Great War against the rest of Europe, but she will leave this Aryan god and her whole world for a Jew

The chestnut blossoms of this city call for sky from narrow courts within apartment blocks.

44 Walter’s Wedding Gift: a Painting by Munch

Couples waltz on a green flat, spread below sea and sky in Prussian blue, a moon, shaped as I, looms pink, hovers above its own reflection.

Two women watch the dancers, one young, in white, reaches for life that flashed past the other in black, left her folded into herself, watching.

Another girl is devoured, death squeezing her white waist, breathing decayed syllables into her neck with thick lips.

At center a couple, wrapped into each other; red dress flaps around his legs, strands of hair reach for his chin, her face already shadowed.

45 At the Opera: Fin-de-siècle femme fatale Murderer, Hope for Women (play by Kokoschka)

When Alban creates Lulu and her trail of dead husbands, I am in the audience. Next to her I look harmless. She is an animal, tamed only in his frantic music, arranged methodically in tone rows.

On stage she fulfills our mythological destiny: woman feared as all-consuming demon, devourer of men, triumphing only over a slain body.

Berg and Schönberg make us singing monsters, daughters of Medusa, furies out for a kill. Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, Dix paint us as bloody corpses: no woman gets away with murder.

After fleeing to London, Lulu is found disemboweled by a serialist, sings her last row. A ghastly end, if you ask me.

I go home to my daughters, defy bourgeois decency with my new lover. I know, they adore us for it, display and encase us on stage and on museum walls.

46 Klimt’s Water Nymphs

I am the Ring’s Rhine-maiden, heigh-ho-ing my way to pieces of art. Fishtail replaced by a trail of dark hair.

I float in a sea of green paint, an empty canvas, swimming me through space as compact maid. Nothing left of me but head.

What have they done to my limbs? How can I body myself?

I have decapitated men: John, the Baptist, Holofernes, Orpheus.

I am the serpent’s head, lizarding around the trunk, tongue a-sizzle with fruit for you. My silhouette says tadpole, sperm, raw blob.

My hair collar says fur befitting a street: lady walking once, ensnaring twice. Served on canvas, I gossip with my doppelganger, her head bobbing angrily in the back.

My words spill into the folds of this water garment, distorted vowels that echo like whale song through its wet chamber, in search of their lost consonants.

47 Otto Weininger Bemoans His Feminine Age

In the Jew and the woman, good and evil are not distinct from one another.

Jews and women are devoid of humor, but addicted to mockery.

The Jew is really nothing, because he believes in nothing.

Judaism is the spirit of modern life. Sexuality is accepted, and contemporary ethics sing the praises of pairings. It is the Jew and the woman who are its apostles and bring guilt on humanity.

Our age is not only the most Jewish, but the most feminine. It is a time when art is content with daubs and seeks its inspiration in the sports of animals.

Woman requires man to be sexual, because she only gains existence through his sexuality.

Women are human beings and must be treated as such, even if they themselves do not wish it.

Man must free himself of sex, for in that way, and that way alone, can he free woman.

In his purity – not, as she believes, in his impurity – lies her salvation. She must certainly be destroyed, as woman; but only to be raised again from the ashes, new, restored to youth, as a real human being.

48 My Third Little Jew, Vienna 1918 Franz is a tiny bird in my hand with beating heart and watchful eyes, whom I must protect from the weather and the cats. Sometimes he tries to be a hero, but I like him better as a little bird, because the other side of him doesn’t need me. (Alma Mahler-Gropius)

I cannot say whether Alma was my greatest stroke of luck or my greatest misfortune. (Franz Werfel) I

She leaves the handsome architect, all Aryan, for Franz, the little Jew who comes at night, woos her with Schumann songs in the salon.

It is not May, but he, the poet, loves cigars and sumptuous dishes, wants to be her love child, son she never had. He names her magic, fruitful golden light, his throat arresting words in smoke. She sees adoring promising writer, naughty boy in need, imploring her to be the instrument of his rebirth. She wants a novel. Enough with poems, those tiny moments of our lives.

Let us create an art that will survive, revive this house with something larger than the insignificant gathering of words.

II

Alma watches a mass of proletarians pass by her red drawing-room. Upon hearing shots, she grabs the revolver, loaded for self-defense.

The monarchy has collapsed, this new Republic changes its face each day. Franz joins the march in uniform, wants to be kissed goodbye.

At night he is back. Clothes torn, dirty, he smells of cheap liquor, tobacco, and proclaims,

49 We founded the Red Guard. She sends him away,

and writes, The howling of the masses is a hellish music. Tolstoy thought he heard angels in it, but it was the sound of his own blood pulsing.

She never meant to be the muse of hordes that turn Vienna upside down, her world of gold drowned on a red November day.

50 Kindertotenlied II: They Don’t Belong to Us

Putzi, our dark star, burns out fast. Eyes like Gustl, his breakfast companion in the Häuschen, then a quivering on our table, the doctor slicing her throat, while I force her limbs into polished oak, hear this breath, a rattle tuning to death, his five songs in D, the key that carries off my laughing child.

Manon, my little Aryan: her infant hand on the large beads of my necklace, slender, nude child by my wind-swept side. Her long braid cannot hold her, pulls her into the well, almost woman, but lost to disease, frozen into a chair, angelic gazelle from heaven, drawn from strings in Alban’s concerto.

Gucki, my violet-eyed companion without father, with me longer than any man, hovering over them in the red salon. My inconstant years leave her scarred. She runs off at sixteen, inscribes this legacy on every figure she shapes, her hands deep in clay. My Anna, the artist I could have been.

51 Anna Mahler: In My Mother’s World

Men waft through the red salon. Her eyes, colored forget-me-not, linger on Arnold’s fingers caressing keys, his lips mouthing Pierrot’s Sprechstimme.

Ravel breakfasts in taffeta, his mustache dye, applied before sleep, tells secrets to the pillow cases at night. Mami complains about all the laundry.

Her eyebrows assign me a place in her world. I drift into sleep on dissonant chords, Alban’s laugh, the liquid tenor of Franz.

But I outgrow her, trowel a deep hole into the ground, strip her bare, sink the naked body, and press loose soil against belly.

I hold her hostage, let her ambitions root in the dark world below. Her arms seek the light above, each finger a petal on the blossoming hand.

Music pours from her mouth, while I measure temples of men, artists who find us, and cast their heads in clay.

52 Resurrecting My Dead Daughter

I wanted you to outlive me, to last. But now I chain my ear to rainy soil and listen deeply to the worms that crawl through every inch of your small bones and soul.

Today I drank a bottle by myself, tried to forget a throat cut open wide, the gentle legs gone stiff with polio that I hear dragging slowly through my night.

So, rise and feel for one last time this heart that still counts strong the long life of my days. I want your veins to run blood-thick with me.

Want you to carry on the Aryan path I made you for, since soon you too will feel your skin go lax, dry up as fast as mine.

53 Alma Imagines Her Descent

Possession of a landscape is incomplete as long as contact has not been physically established by bathing in the living stream of its waters. (Franz Werfel) The lake lies as silver plate. I pierce its smooth surface with naked body, lower my limbs into the unknown dark that hovers below the shimmering splendor.

My toes feel mud licking at their calloused surface, a sucking of flesh into what lures deeper yet: hidden call of the ground caressing, softening my hardened crust.

54 The Secret Life of Water It doesn’t have to be a villa… but gas, electric light, water, plumbing: that’s necessary (Arnold Schönberg, letter 1915)

The way water rises from the ground, where it has been humming patiently in pipes, waiting to burst into the light, exchange iron for air, mix metal with oxygen.

Only to return into its cool web, to languish in dark and rot. Watery secret underground. The life of molecules streaming like headlights along highways at night.

How it seeps into my silk sleeve, sticks it to skin, sings its own music, a marvelous song. Coalescing to drops on my surface, it seeks comfort in its own cohesion.

How it cleans us with its cool greeting from another world, soaks into paper, swells its pores into new shapes, dissolves these notes into nothing but remnant of ink.

55 That Moment

When the oozing lines of my songs, were snatched away like the children expelled from my womb, the only place left in sound lay open between consonants hissing too loud – the songs silent forever, my music gone forever – my body lay on the sheet of the abandoned world, among abandoned songs, exposed to star dust forever,

I had to search for a pen.

56 In Response to Tom Lehrer Alma, tell us! All modern women are jealous. Which of your magical wands Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz? (Tom Lehrer) From Gustav to Walter to Oskar to Franz, no rest for me in this wicked Tanz.

It wasn’t a waltz, there were more than three, more of a tango with kicks from the knee.

From Franz to Oskar to Walter to Gustav the return of the same, but a man I must have.

I cannot remember who came first, who last. It’s now just remnant of my glorious past.

From Gustav to Oskar to Franz and Walter one after the other, I was served on their altar.

I became the muse, their demanding mother, set the rules for encounter, whether husband or lover.

But Franz to Gustav to Walter to Oskar my soul, stripped bare, I would have lost her.

His art was my favorite among those men, since I was exclusive as model then.

57

SECTION III:

IM EXIL

58 Closing In My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats. (Sylvia Plath) Alma, I wrap you into trailing scarves, a silk package to unravel.

You ensnare the audience at your feet, twirl into history’s gaping mouth.

When the house falls still, you shroud yourself tighter into clouds of unknowing.

Cloth will drown out your songs, the screams of children you bore

to men who wanted nothing but to set you ablaze for extinction, then collect your ashen smile.

Spill pearls from lips and fingertips, cast gold to marching masses below.

They invaded your rings, came for your Jews, their art in the dark, whisked them away to trains, trampled the skirts of your city with their polished boots, their hooked arms and shouts of salvation.

Take your little Jew, stick him in Lederhosen, and run from Sieg Heil.

Sing Edelweiss and aim south, survive the Pyrenees, reach for water.

59

Boats from Porto grind for days across the Atlantic, spill you into the New World.

Hollywood suckles you, its émigrés stopping by for cards on Sunday afternoon.

In silk you sit and wait for Franz to pour his novel down your throat where long ago was sound and spinning drift of notes, melodic play of modes.

In your suitcase a bust, a score of one famed man you suffered before you lured the next, cocooned him tight, drained him of his best.

The rest, as they say, is history where scholars pry from books the problem they call Alma.

60 Through the Night Sky

Alma floats in the formaldehyde of my imagination, her blue eyes in each photo probing me for lines.

Trumpets call us to march, to change our stars, swim through the night sky, unravel it, inhale its black sound, a string legato.

With us move birches and night moths, a whole menagerie of silence that serves us fluid from bark and wing, shelter to sing.

In the cities we leave behind, men laugh at our unforgivable hips and books, a threadbare music that echoes and dies.

61 Aboard the New Hellas, October 1940

We have left our known world behind. Aboard this humming universe we lose track of days: sun rises behind, burns a circle into our skin, then calls us from its silver bed, ready to receive us.

Below a world of darkness, where sharks cut sharp teeth into small-fish flesh, their bone floating in thick depth, alive only in motion, while the Greek captain grins and steers our fragile bodies into the unknown.

Europe is but a small swatch of colors painted on a map, a noise of countries, arrayed around Vienna, its heart pumping brown blood. If only we could stay on this ship, our skin flapping in the salty wind.

62 Ways to Water the Garden, Beverly Hills 1942

Franz prefers a light, even spray from the hose across mulched ground, wet slowly seeping through crushed bark into soil, perhaps near a root, or not.

I want to be efficient, fill a can to the rim, drag it across the lawn, pour a thick stream from its spout down each plant’s stem, aim straight for the root.

Some say watering at night spares green stalks the burning prism of each droplet; others predict rot and decay for roots left suspended in dark water.

63 Im Exil 1945: Alma’s L.A. Elegy The city is named after the angels And you meet angels on every hand They smell of oil and wear golden pessaries And, with blue rings round their eyes Feed the writers in their swimming pools every morning. (Bertolt Brecht, from “Hollywood Elegies”) Beached on the outer edges of a continent. Beyond it nothing but water, to rock me in wet arms. The black water of the Pacific where we will create an island of plastic, junk of our convenience swirled into something like stable ground, assuring us that we all will walk on water if only we catch enough of it in plastic.

They tell me of mountains within this continent, like the Dolomites, where Gustav and I hiked during our last few summers. All I see is water, a black expanse, the shield of the earth in motion. Tennis with the Schönbergs at three, Doppelkopf with the Manns tonight. Franz is working on a novel and his third heart attack.

With the Jews of Europe, I blister in this relentless burning, as if we are letters in a book. Shake them and the rubble of Europe will rise, briefly, then sink back into the page.

***

Here everyone prefers shopping to art, plastic to silk, cartoon figures to flesh. The city has grown, a cancer between salt water and desert. Soon a multi-muscled millionaire my Landsmann, will govern flat abs, white teeth, and flashing screens. We have conquered the body,

64 stick it in a sealed envelope, lick it goodbye: air mail to Mars. First planet out. Also nothing but desert.

We make cake from cardstock, squeeze food into buns and turn everything saccharine. We arm ourselves, herald self-defense, hunt communists and everyone who does not pledge allegiance. We love artifice, wonders of orthodontics and polymer science. Prefer to keep you away with our smiles. Prefer “nice to meet you” to meeting you. We are all Du here, gladly shrink your name down to one syllable: Walter to Walt, Gustav to Gus.

***

The houses are flimsy contraptions, built of nothing but plywood, plaster and glue. The masons have departed. We’re drifting toward a modular existence. I packed lace and silk, will soon succumb to acetate rayon.

At night I revise my life while the Pacific drowns out all music. I remember concert halls, opera houses, cities, but see only sand and crippled pine. When it rains the hillsides turn mud, slide into the bottom of canyons and take everything with them.

Lucky Gustav is long gone, bade us early farewell in an endless movement: a hymn that dissolves into strings, the violins’ re and mi, back and forth, calling out only questions, waiting.

65 Alma Hears Voices on the Elevator

What I don’t understand isn’t what they say, it’s everything they don’t say, everything they’re not saying. (Philip Roth)

I talk to you because I am stuck here with you. I talk to you because you wait in the same checkout line at the supermarket. I talk to you because you are in my way. I talk to you because you mean nothing to me. For the pleasure of remaining autonomous. Because I don’t want to know you. Don’t know how to know.

I talk to you because silence is foreign to me, as foreign as you. I talk to you in order to not say anything. I fill the air between us with words. They make sense, but they don’t speak. They sound polite, but they don’t mean a thing. I call it quits. I call us friends.

I talk to you because I am stuck with you here. Your body is here. Far too close. You are in my way. I cannot stand your foreign body. I cannot understand a word you say. Instead, I stand over your body, step on it and press its bones into this muck. I suck on your bones, turn them into instrument, fiddle them with hands, punch holes. Holes that will let the air pass through, make molecules vibrate: a music of their own, a gig of bones, danse macabre.

I will absorb you into this soil. There will be nothing left of you. I will mold you to my world, its cardboard houses and plastic bags. This cellophane world will wrap you up. Whatever is left of you. It will suffocate you, suck every word out of you.

I am your friend. I talk to you. I am stuck with you.

66 Contemplating the Limpet Life

As the tide recedes, it returns to the home scar, sucks deep into its rock to avoid desiccation, its shell shaped to complete the hard house.

Life in the intertidal zone is not easy: dried out by sun for hours, then swept away by waves ascending, the limpet clutches

to coastal rock with pedal mucus, resembles this ancient host. It will die rather than let go, providing metaphor for the obstinate.

Hungry, it ripples the muscle of its foot, forages for algae in the shallow waters, its tongue a floating ribbon with rows of teeth.

Food of starfish, shore-birds, men, it competes with barnacles and mussels for space on the rock, shortens its own life when the eating is good.

Hermaphrodite the first nine months, it settles into male youth, then transforms into female who rides out the clinging to this rough world.

67 Visit to Vienna, June 1946

I was once Vienna, its golden canvas. Now I am tired of this tiered confection of a city, its temples to art in rubble.

I left the night it was taken, a swastika blooming from each car.

As a present they got Hitler, wrapped in brown wool, red bow. Signed and dated March 13, 1938.

He wanted to exhibit his favorite artist, but Klimt’s women bear Jewish names and children who were cattled off to Auschwitz.

My villa now home to Russians who give orders in alien alphabet from Gustav’s desk. I do know Moll sold my Munch, willed father’s landscapes away before hanging his sorry bones from the banister.

68 Alma’s Lunar Eclipse How dark is the foundation upon which our life rests? (Gustav Mahler) At night no food in the house, only raw matter, in the humming white hole of the fridge.

My bed grows narrower. You claim I owe you words. I conjure my city’s rings, golden green of its hills in April.

The flesh melted off my world. I search for a second earth: to clasp me between sheets of rock, fold me into its valleys.

Darkness invades me: emptied of luminous force, I was only satellite, nothing but reflection— now covered in shadow.

A dish of moon silvers away: coin tucking into night amid splatter of planets, filament in the dark.

69 Wishcraft: a home remedy

play Bach before breakfast champagne by the bottle. water soil. feet buried in mud. worms nipping skin.

draw diphthongs from vowels. foul play the tongue. mince words bring to boil mixed letters: a stew.

draw milk. churn it cold. heat to mold butter. then whine: high pierce. with low melt moan.

pull veins. fry guts to strings. fold your breast. hold. feel soft fat: moon flesh. sing it to sleep.

70 Alma Goes Fishing From the head down she was simply a bag of potatoes, veiled in flowing robes,… shrouding chest and stomach. (Albrecht Joseph, son-in-law) The silver river serves me glimpses of trembling salmon. I wish to feast, my fists are ready to catch and kill.

Fir trees flurry my eyes. I envision volleys of wild fish discharged into air, an iridescent sphere.

A lace of water collars my neck with the slick of fish, sprays a veil on my chest, below this nest of white hair:

I have become an old woman, fishing for her lost world, for layers of cells to rain over her wrinkled life.

Back home, my cook goes to work, fillets, braises in salt, broiling scales to a crisp that cradles shimmering flesh.

I dig my fork into pink, detach flake from skin, prowl through fish for bone, sink warmth into my throat.

Where once I sang and formed vibrating air into sound, I now ingest this life and shroud my night in wine.

71 Alma in the Bilingual Torture Chamber

Sheaf is schief, and wild sounds wild. Grain gone Pisa calls us outside.

False is falsch and richtig right. Some friends are true, seen in this light.

Singing becomes singen, but song ist Lied. Poem not just made, but condensed into Gedicht.

Licht always light, not just in brightness, but also weight. Its opposite schwer.

We swear allegiance to all that is heavy, drag its mass in an act of tragen. Nicht tragisch.

Bei Tag we are all night. In der Nacht no sign of day that would make us neu, renew us as Heu:

rustling hay, come from Gras, dried up, sending its Gas into the warm dark of the barn.

Wo wir schlafen, although our sleep is thin, pressed through the spokes of Fortuna.

Our Glück has shrunk to luck, happiness lost its space, each word a chamber:

Raum we no longer inhabit.

72 Kindertotenlied III: From Alma’s Album

I

Figure one: the dead girl. Daughter I built of counter-clockwise parts in my spiral city. Its rings mother- ing our creations. Figure two: same parts, but more Aryan. Figure three: flushed down the toilet. I fashioned a heart. Kept watch at night, heard time whoosh past my bedroom door, spinning like the absent seedling they mashed deep inside me. – Turned thing, he drowned in a spiral of blood. I gathered wild silk for my nesting. One egg hung on. One child withstood the swirls of my life. History’s hard on women who circulate. With food I fled to my salon, drew from art her masters. On their masts I thrive, marching forward. Figured: if smart, this child in my nest may survive.

73 II

Figure one: the dead composer. A bust of a husband, long gone, famous. I map this tall city. Its avenues must

hurl me to heaven. Figure two: we sat in a Kaffeehaus in Manhattan and flushed throats with Mokka. The familiar sap lulled our emptied life. Avenues still rush toward wet destinations: ocean on both ends, spilling rich sewage like us back into nations we fled. We walked across dark water, carefully cupping our home’s libations.

At night I am nothing but mother, black widow with bust, history’s lapse. Figure three: One child left, without father.

I return to my salon, draw from schnapps heat that sustains: me, liquefied. Nailed to the tower I inhabit. Perhaps

I stick, since I cannot face that I failed.

74 Miss Alma Would Rather Be Dancing

Wait! I turn you, swirl around black hat, well-suited pimps. Their women draw a circle filled with kicks of heels forever. There’s no dancing, just this leaning. Tall the letter, pairs construct it: A—the wood floor filled with dancing A’s—their legs strike out, draw letters, write an alpha- bet of yearning, lust, denial.

One and three four. Piazolla, man of tango cries, bandoneon world. Piano beats to hasten steps across the floor, legs spiking sharp through legs, whisk by, control each frame, our shape a cut, a shuffling air. We dance all night, forever.

Hell, those Nazis got away to Argentinia while forlorn we sit aside a dark, black water, deal out cards and maraschino cherries, trifling with our Sundays.

But no man I loved was born to dance with legs like shark. There was no time when I was whisked around a dance floor by a chest who lead me, squared me safe, with lightly dangling arms, feet nimble, feeling floor first.

***

Short on both sides are the lines that try to follow dance and covet amphibrachus’ shortened arm span. So Miss Alma will tonight no longer dream of Piazolla and the tango. Will instead float flat in water, feel the darkness grab her silk dress, make her hair wind, weighted curls, around a shark tooth.

75

With a knife comes Mack and saves her, leads her to the floor of wood, legs snapping back. Eyes closed so only rhythm, old and staid, can hold her heart, its beats to ground of water.

76 Alma Calls on Ophelia

My quiet grave is made of myths, of barbarous salt, with metal and rubber. It shines white along the floor, suspended, buried, the place of what-is-not. Green so blue, black glow. World with ghosts—plankton, barnacles nesting on hips, wrists, mouths frozen in horror. Sound turned silence, the shed skin of a lover, sheets of shapes that slept. Once I was all escape—siren of cinnamon, comet behind me, long legs in skirts that craved hard slap.

***

Men read this girl, wanted more. She consumed lipstick, color like a promise: maroon. Story lost to water, tea leaves. I speared the last trout, its pages of intestine. That girl came under their kiss, mud in her throat, delivered her verdigris message. Words within her belly: children of plankton, descendants of eel. A whole alphabet grew inside her. Each letter a crumb she names with a body turned tongue: A for apple, B for bone, C for cunt.

77 Alma in March

I grab each morning and drag it through the rest of the day, drown myself in amber, preserve lashes and fragments of eyes in fluid gold.

To fill time I chew grass, tune my sinews and march down avenues and moo at the sun, add one month to the calendar each year, forego recipes, directions.

I worship my corset, how it presses into ribs, counts each breath I take. I am a travesty. So I dance, bury the past and plant my dry feet in water.

For breakfast, I suck marrow trim the edges of my life, then make love to the butcher amid gutted carcasses. Sundays I teach my dead children to rise again.

At night I transcribe poems into bones. I feel myself tilt on an axis I cannot see. I find the front of a line leading nowhere, winding around endless blocks of brownstones.

For years I have conversed only with furniture, fluffed each pillow into a shrine, wandered the avenues divining water and telling strangers the time of day.

For preservation I dwell in a jar of blue glass,

78 bake tarts for the cat, lick gold letters off parchment. God willing I will eat my heart out by June.

79 Alma instructs herself in home-remedy euthanasia

map the cat. her bone turned stone. spine one hard arc. each vertebra a rock. each breath rot. she courts short days. starves. flesh out of skin.

fur draws away. each hair a stick. it points. to porcupine. joints rub bone. kill the cat. for lunch. her last day cut. as was the past. its cut and pasted path.

fill the tub. hold. down her nose perhaps she will turn fish. draw oxygen from wet. she fights. for her lungs take anything: clouds pepper blood. all holes full fast.

do not regret. fold. up the bed. hold. wake. dig soil. to grave.

80 Postlude: Litany for Alma

You are not his Alma, beloved soul sucking on his life, his Almschi, Almi, Mami, Mama. You are not the widow of the four arts, you are not that woman on the wall, stuck in gold canvas, or scraped into frames of blue brush strokes. You are not their goddess, not pillar on pedestal, pistol-whipping one after the other, not pillow for their heads, domina for whom they perform artistic tricks, tricks of scale and scaffold, tricks of sentence and song, of sketch and stone.

You are not the plundered possession each man claims, not this one’s muttering muse, or that one’s fatal femme, not the sputtering engine of their circling creations, their crying motivations, their marvelous effusions, spatter of paint, point of resonance, echo of Romanticism, hum of each man, trailing you, dead bird, kill. You are not your children, not the ones who died and not the one you pierced with a needle inside your bloody walls. Not the boy you killed in a deadly dance. You are not five songs printed in limited edition, pretty, but leading only to lunch meat, and child’s play. You knew they were corpses.

You are Vienna, this city of flaring circles, failing politics, gypsy skirts, whore petticoats, You are four letters, four tall mountains to scale, only one steep ‘l’ away from god. You are one vowel, open to the throat, striving for its perfect chiaroscuro, pried apart leisurely by tongue and lips, lulling bilabial nasal hum, all voiced, all softness, all blue pool of drowning. You are a name, text of the past, words in a book everyone leers over and casts aside in disgust. You are the name of a problem to scholars, a preposterous primadonna, protector of your artistic loot, field work student of high art, archeologist of your past.

81 You are a vampire, landing on the white neck of man, quiet as a lunar moth. Vile woman, you are viable for many occasions, yet violable in the end, the round sound of maple wood, saturated brown, instrumental woman: viola d’amore of Vienna. Song of the city, stench of your sex. Weininger knew that women are the scum of western civilization, absence of signification, marvel of black hole sucking the marrow out of the house we inherit. You are antigravity, demolishing space, demon that fills the crevices of existence.

You are and you are not. You were, then you were not. Now you are not, a ghost of ghosts, of a ghost city, ghost civilization, of ghost symphonies, a silent silhouette, trace on death art.

82 END NOTES

POEMS IN SECTION I

Encountering Alma – The quotations are from poems by Dora Malech and Sara Tracey and from Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe (Poet’s Love). The first song of the cycle is “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” (In the beautiful month of May) and is famous for its open end on the dominant seventh chord, which has been interpreted as an indication of the self-enclosed nature of the cycle form. “I Wander among Flowers” is an early song by Alma Mahler, set to a poem by Heinrich Heine, whose seemingly simple love poems are ironic in nature and also inspired Schumann’s song cycle. Alma wrote in her diary, "I've no idea whether it's good. I only know that love's passion went into it." It became part of the group of five songs of hers that were published in 1910. Hugh Wood wrote about Alma’s capacity to taint everything.

He wraps me up – I am referring here to three paintings, Judith I (1901), Danae (1907), and Pallas Athena (1898). There is also a second painting of Judith, often referred to as Salome (1909). Gustav Klimt was the friend of Alma’s stepfather, Carl Moll. They were both painters and founders of the Vienna Secession, an influential art movement. Klimt was an ardent admirer of young Alma and her love interest at sixteen.

My Jewish Trio – Alexander von Zemlinsky was Alma’s composition teacher, with whom she also had a romantic involvement before her marriage to Mahler. He als taught the avantgarde composers of the time, such as Arnold Schönberg. The composer Gustav Mahler was Alma’s first husband and father of their daughters Maria/Putzi and Anna/Gucki. Franz Werfel, a poet, later novelist, became Alma’s third husband. He was also the father of her only son, who died a few months after being born immaturely.

His Favorite Child – Kindertotenlieder is a famous song cycle of Mahler’s that Alma linked to the death of their daughter Maria/Putzi. Mahler wrote his songs in 1901 and 1904, i.e. before the death of Putzi and wrote: "I placed myself in the situation that a child of mine had died. When I really lost my daughter, I could not have written these songs any more" (Reik 315). Alma’s father was Emil Schindler, a successful Viennese landscape painter, who died when she was young.

Kindertotenlied I: List of My Vanished Offspring – “Often I think they have only gone out,” is the fourth song in Gustav Mahler’s cycle for voice and orchestra. He set his five songs to the poems of Friedrich Rückert, whose original cycle contained 428 poems in 1833-34 in reaction to the death of his two children.

83 Gute Nacht, Herr Architekt – Arthur Schnitzler was a writer and close friend of Alma Mahler’s. At Tobelbad Alma began an affair with Walter Gropius, the German architect, who later became the founder of Bauhaus movement and Alma’s second husband. Their daughter Manon died of polio at age 19.

Freud and Leyden – “in Freud und Leid” is a standing expression in German, translated as “in joy and pain” or “in weal and woe.” Leyden was Freud was vacationing in Leyden, so Mahler had to travel to Holland to visit him. This happened in the aftermath of finding out about Alma’s affair with Gropius in the summer of 1910.

Dancing in Cleveland, 1911 – When conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Mahler went on tour to Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester, and Cleveland. The concert was held at Gray’s Armory, where the Cleveland Orchestra later came to perform prior to relocating to Severance Hall. At the Polish church in Slavic Village Cleveland City Music and its orchestra now hold performances.

POEMS IN SECTION II

After Mahler – After Mahler’s death Alma first had an affair with the biologist Paul Kammerer and for a while became his lab assistant. The influential composer and teacher Arnold Schönberg, founder of twelve-tone music and second Viennese school, frequented Alma’s salon, as did his student Alban Berg, the expressionist composer of the operas Wozzeck and Lulu, who later dedicated his famous Violin Concerto to Manon. The expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka became Alma’s lover from 1912-14

Advice in the Old Country – The famous quote from the ballad “Denn wovon lebt der Mensch” (For what does man live on), sung by Macheath and Jenny in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, and translates into “First comes the feeding, then come morals.”

Oskar Alma Kokoschka – Kokoschka used this combination of his own name and Alma’s. He also wrote a poem entitled “Allos Makar,” an anagram of both of their names, translated as “something else is happy” or “happiness comes from a different way.”

Oskar: My Alma – Kokoschka described his play as “a clash between the forces of procreation and destruction” (Keegan 179). It’s provocative nature got him expelled from the School of Arts and Crafts. Woman in Blue and Double-Act were paintings by Kokoschka. Maler is the German word for painter. Kokoschka’s most famous painting of Alma is Bride of the Wind. Poet and friend Georg Trakl visited the studio while Kokoschka was working on it, and his lines, “Over black rocks / Drunk with death plunges / The glowing Bride of the Wind,” inspired the title. “Oberwildling” and “Bürgerschreck” roughly translate into “chief savage” and “terror to the bourgeoisie.”

At the Opera: Conversation with a Doll – E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short stories became the basis of Jaques Offenbach’s opera Les contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann,

84 1881). The first act is based on Hoffmann’s famously uncanny story “The Sandman,” and features the life-like doll Olympia, who sings one of opera’s great coloratura arias, “Les oiseaux dans la charmille.” In his essay about the uncanny, Freud called Hoffmann the “unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature.”

Alma’s Ansturm – This poem owes its ideas to Susan MacArthur’s chapter on the song “Ansturm” (Onrush) by Alma Mahler, composed to a poem by Richard Dehmel in 1911 and published in 1915. Do not be angry when my passion darkly breaks its bounds. / That it not consume us it must come out into the Light! Like the opening song to Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe (Poet’s Love), “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” which I mention in “Fragments of Encounter,” Alma’s song ends on the dominant-seventh instead of the expected tonic chord.

Alma at the Ballet Russe – The epigraph is from Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theatre,” a fictionalized conversation about the grace of the puppet (and the bear) vs. the human lack of it that is a result of human self-consciousness. Kleist (1777- 1811) ironically breaks with the aesthetic ideals of classicism and romanticism. Alma traveled to Paris with Lilly Leiser in 1912.

Walter Gropius Takes Alma to Berlin – After the affair with Kokoschka ended, Alma rekindled her relationship with Gropius, and they were married from 1915 to 1920. Gropius spent most of their married life away at the Western front. Their daughter, Manon Gropius, was born in 1916.

Walter’s Wedding Gift: a Painting by Edvard Munch – Walter Gropius gave Alma a different painting by Munch, Midnight Sun, but the painting described here is The Dance of Life (1899-1900) and depicts the stages of women’s lives, similar to famous paintings by Picasso and Klimt.

At the Opera: Fin-de-siecle femme fatale – Berg’s opera Lulu was not completed until 1937, but it is based on the “Lulu” plays by Frank Wedekind, Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904), who depict the rise and eventual fall of a young dancer with frank depictions of sexuality and violence. Wedekind himself played Jack the Ripper in the premier performance. G.W. Pabst’s silent film Pandora’s Box (1929) starred Louise Brooks as Lulu.

Klimt’s Water Nymphs –The Rhine maidens in Wagner’s Ring Cycle are protecting the gold. Klimt portrayed woman as decapitating seductress in several of his paintings, especially in Judith I (1901) and Judith II, also called Salome (1902). At the same time, the heads of these women are often separated from the body by a wide golden choker. Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations accompanied Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (1893), which later became the libretto to Richard Strauss’s controversial, modern opera Salome (1905), which followed his equally modern work Elektra (1909). The Mahler’s were friends with Strauss.

85 Otto Weininger Bemoans His Feminine Age – This poem was entirely found among the pages of chapter XIII “Judaism” of Weininger’s book Sex and Character. Even though the book was already published in 1902, and Weininger had already committed suicide, I am using his ideas in this second section of the manuscript. Most Weininger’s book addresses the “woman question” of his age, but his work illustrates the shift toward the “Jewish question.” Salome as well as Judith were Jewish women and are at times depicted with semitic features. So the gynecide is linked to the later genocide (Dijkstra).

My Third Little Jew, Vienna 1918 – Due to Alma’s influence Franz Werfel turns to writing big novels for the remainder of his life and becomes financially successful. Some critics, however, have noted that his real talent, as a poet, may have gotten lost in the process. The political conflict between Alma and Franz, fueled also by her anti-Semitism, will haunt their 30-year relationship all the way to California, and, according to friends, be a constant source of aggravation to him. The quotes are from a poem by Werfel, a letter by him, and Alma’s diaries.

Anna Mahler: In My Mother’s World – In 1920 Alma organized several concerts of Schönberg’s works, among them his influential chamber work Pierrot Lunaire, for which he developed the expressionist vocal technique of Sprechstimme, a speaking of melody on approximate pitches. In 1921 attempted to introduce various foreign composers to his work. Ravel considered Schönberg’s music something conceived in a laboratory, but stayed with Alma for three weeks. Anna/Gucki, Alma’s only surviving child became a sculptor, and had five husbands of her own.

Resurrecting My Dead Daughter – Alma made no secret out of the fact that she favored her Aryan daughter, Manon, over Mahler’s daughter, Anna. In fact, her attempt to rekindle the relationship with Gropius after Kokoschka was in some ways fueled by her desire for a racially pure child. Manon’s death in 1935 affected many friends in Alma’s circle deeply, among them Alban Berg.

That Moment – Written as imitation or echo of Ted Hughes’ poem by the same title from Crow (1970).

Interlude: In Response to Tom Lehrer – Lehrer’s well-known song does not mention Oskar Kokoschka.

POEMS IN SECTION III

Alma Hears Voices on the Elevator – The epigraph is from Roth’s novel The Human Stain.

Visit to Vienna, June 1946 – The quote is from Rita Dove’s recent book Sonata Mulattica, in which she retraces the life of the bi-racial violinist George Bridgetower, who studied with Franz Joseph Haydn, and to whom Beethoven dedicated his Kreutzer

86 Sonata until they had a falling out. Alma left her stepfather, the painter and Nazi sympathizer Carl Moll, in charge of her house and many art works.

Wishcraft: a home remedy – The broken lines of this poem and the latter home-remedy poem owe their form to D.A. Powell’s poems with their long lines and spacings.

Kindertotenlied III: From Alma’s Album – after the terza rima by Dan Beachy-Quick and Srikanth Reddy, which takes its inspiration from Robert Smithson’s large-scale spiral sculpture Spiral Jetty (1970) in Great Salt Lake, Utah. Three terza rimas are excerpted from the jointly authored chapbook Canto in the first February edition of the online journal The Offending Adam.

Miss Alma Would Rather Be Dancing – This poem is built entirely from the four-beat measure of the tango rhythm with its stress on one, followed by an unstressed pick-up on two-and, and stress on three, which translates into a single-stress foot, followed by a short pause and an amphibrach, a pattern I repeat in each line.

Alma Calls on Ophelia – an erasure of the prose poem “The Drowned Girl” by Eve Alexandra.

87 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexandra, Eve. The Drowned Girl. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2003. (Wick Poetry First Books Series #9)

Beachy-Quick, Dan and Srikanth Reddy. Excerpt from Canto. The Offending Adam (1 February 2010). Online. February 3, 2010. http://theoffendingadam.com/issue/001/beachy-quick-reddy-stobb-sweeney-clark/

Bridgewater, Patrick. “Some Early Twentieth-Century Bildgedichte.” Text into Image, Image into Text: Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary… Jeffrey Morrison, Florian Krobb. Amsterdam, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1997. 67-76

Butler, Ruth. Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model Wives of Cezanne, Monet and Rodin. Princeton: Yale UP, 2008.

Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Dove, Rita. Sonata Mulattica: Poems. New York: Norton, 2009.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. David McClintock, trl. London: Penguin, 2003.

Giroud, Francoise. Alma Mahler: The Art of Being Loved. R.M. Stock, trl. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

Keegan, Susanne. The Bride of the Wind: The Life and Times of Alma Mahler-Werfel. New York: Viking, 1991,

Kleist, Heinrich von. “On the Marionette Theatre.” Idris Parry, trl. Southern Cross Review Archives. Online. March 20, 2010. http://www.southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm

Lehrer, Tom. “Alma.” Online. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH4J8CIBc7Q

Lubbock, Tom. “Klimt, Gustav. Water Nymphs (1899).” The Independent. Great Arts Series. January 26, 2007. Online. June 15, 2010. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/klimt-gustav- water-nymphs-1899-744417.html

88 MacArthur, Sally. “The Power of Sound, the Power of Sex: Alma Schindler-Mahler's Ansturm.” Feminist Aesthetics in Music. Sally MacArthur. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.

Mahler, Alma. Mein Leben. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1960.

--- and E. Ashton. And the Bridge Is Love. New York: Harcourt, 1958.

Mahler, Gustav. Ein Glück ohne Ruh': die Briefe Gustav Mahlers an Alma. First complete edition. Henry-Louis de La Grange and Günther Weiss, Eds. Berlin: Siedler, 1995.

Malech, Dora. “Makeup.” Shore Ordered Ocean. Padstow, Cornwall: Waywiser, 2009. 22.

Phillip, Max. The Artist’s Wife: a Novel. New York: Holt, 2001.

Powell, D.A. Tea. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1998.

Reik, Theodor. The Haunting Melody: Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953.

Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990.

Tracey, Sara. “Summer of Hammers and Whiskey.” Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal 21 (Spring 2010). Online. July 6, 2010. http://arseniclobster.magere.com/archive/issuetwentyone/210201.html

Wood, Hugh. “Mahler Triumphant: a Great Composer Nears the End of a Great Biographical Voyage.” The Times Literary Supplement. July 30, 2008. Online. July 6, 2010. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article44 29303.ece

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