…. There was a cart
we used to transport brochures
from a storage closet
to the Desk. You had to steer it
back through the Renaissance
into a passage that
opened in a dark medieval hallway
through a door without a handle
you backed into after opening
one-handed with a key called
the Number Two that was
hanging from a
ball link chain around your neck. We
talk a lot about death,
my husband and I. I want to add to
the utter absence
of the weight that once seemed everlasting
of the child asleep
upon me that
I can feel not feeling,
which is the overtaking void circumscribed exactly,
the pressure at my nape
of that ball link chain when I
bent down to insert the key,
turned it, pushed the door open,
and then the glimmering, insignificant beauty
of the release
of my neck as I withdrew key from lock,
stood up, and entered.
My mother swam in
a man-made body called the Delta Reservoir
near the Mohawk River
outside Rome, New York
that was the intentional result of
the engineered flooding of
a village called
Delta
that had been developed
into something more than just
acreage by two men named Stark and Prosper.
You are an American Girl. Here you are in
an American Poem
getting in the American
water. Let’s go under
together. “I used to get
nose bleeds from the pressure. I don’t know
that I want to get in the poem—”
There is a ladder.
Itself a salvage.
Let’s back down it slowly
deep in the quiet American
Wing of the Museum
in darkness toward a new closet—not for storage
but installed for public
viewing, a woman’s
wardrobe. Private,
folded things, ironed, crisp
as peeling an orange in sunlight. Lit
like a refrigerator in a dream,
with almost nothing in it, who can
stand before it and not
divest?
Stark and Prosper. Starched and Proper. Stiff and Angry. Forced and entered.
Sorted and counted. Stored and forgotten.
A pull to bottom I
associate
with dream ending before
awakening. Not “thoughtless”;
beyond thinking. End-of-recording
sound of the needle
dragging the void. Why should I, we, be
afraid? Human consciousness far
predates me
oiling the mahogany handrail
with my mere presence. Rembrandt/
Not Rembrandt,
1995, was the first special exhibition
I attended as museum
employee; paced it with the proprietary edge
of a paid informant. Submit
everything to the binary.
It had the stiff, infrared soul
of connoisseurship;
Rembrandt/
Not Rembrandt, that’s the question;
posed it like a strobe
with the typesetter’s solidus, the
forward slash, a force field between
who did and who did not make it,
without that indecisive
human “Or” Milton imposes
between the given and the made—
Eve withdrawing from Adam
with such gardening tools as are yet rude,
guiltless of fire had formed, or angels brought.
Choose
a side, poet, which is it—Eve or God
who forged the hoe? Forgery, forgery,
forgery, flash, flash, flash. I said to myself,
if you have to ask …
but I stood before each
painting
eating half-shadow, umber, and ocher
every day for a month
of lunch hours trying to know. “The handling
of the built-up impasto
is itself a valid argument
against,”
writes the curator, Walter Leidke in the
exhibition catalog,
<FORGERY>
and yet, a few paintings over—Portrait
of a Man (The Auctioneer)—“it is
surprising how
successful the unknown
painter was
at imitating Rembrandt’s manner
in the light effects on the sitter’s
left cuff….” And so I came to love that
cuff, its lace and dust, and loved the
wrist that cuff suggests, obscured here in the painting
by the ledger
the auctioneer is holding
on which the trembling value of what—some cows?
suggests a field, in mind,
where a calf moves
in the shadow of a barn.
The hot smell of manure
and mulch. A bull. How much is it all worth?
Self portrait of the young artist as
auctioneer with your check list and radiant
left
cuff that Rembrandt couldn’t have
better lit, I see you; I think I touched that cuff and more
at a keg party in Slonim Woods
and sensed
its tragic aptitude,
counterpart to your dull right
wrist
lacking the vision of an artist’s truth. Is that
the word? Truth?
Follower of Rembrandt,
I followed you into the blue woods, but I changed my mind.
There was a museum guard who would
not leave me alone in the Rembrandt/
Not Rembrandt
show. Like everyone,
he used his breaks to flip through
the large black binder of better jobs
Human Resources left out on a table
for us, and was eventually transferred
to the department of design to
walk the collection with a power drill
tightening the Lucite fixtures
that held brochures.
He was
peculiar, and I was afraid of him.
When he asked if he could sit beside me
in the employees’ cafeteria,
situated down a
private-access stairway
beneath
the small-scale models
of a prosperous and tedious imagined
hereafter of a Middle Kingdom
civil servant served by
a labor force of affectless
miniature
ghosts trapped
in menial afterlives on boats, in gardens,
slaughterhouses, cattle stables,
and a cramped granary
divided into two tight rooms separating
those hoisting sacks
from scribal clerks squatting on the granary floor
recording each ounce of grain,
I could not find my no. So down he put
his tray and we talked a while.
He did something
obscene, I
don’t remember what,
with a red cherry tomato. Two months later
he was led out
of the museum on a date
rape charge in cuffs, which seemed so new then,
but as a phrase was coined in
1973,
so technically is as old as
me. We grew up together
in the semi-finished basements
of the suburbs
listening to the upstairs plumbing rush the
shit of our fathers
into the earth. Rembrandt/
Not Rembrandt was a show about the audacity of
no. It either is or it isn’t. Rembrandt
or not. But we both know,
though I
have to say it, there can
be truth without vision—call it
competence—you follow it out onto the ice
with confidence
finding purchase on the surface
in the boot-ruts left by
others, but it will never
get me across
a lake this size. My mother, a teenager,
more than half a century ago
on the telephone with a friend on
a day like this—
crystalline, indifferent—heard his
little brother through the black receiver
run panting into the house
yelling that a littler sister yet
had broken through.
The ice was a
figure when I started that thought,
but it transformed to ground,
which is the beginning of disaster,
as ground gives
way to the natural transitions of
the states of matter, in this
case, just above the solidus,
the temperature below which
a given substance—lake water, or my will—
is solid. As a mark
of punctuation— / —
solidus descends toward
us from the
imperial Roman coin of
(nearly) solid gold, also called a solidus,
on the same downward spiraling staircase
that brings sold to soldier—one who serves
for pay.
Such coins are on
display today in gallery three oh one
right outside the gift shop, but a debossed glass weight
one could use to gauge debasement
is too far away
to help debate
the worth. Did you
consent in basements? Yes/no. Circle one.
I didn’t no. And under the Information
Desk? Did you no? I would
now. But I didn’t how
so long ago. Rembrandt,
Rembrandt, Rembrandt, not,
not, not. From slurry to slip
and back we go. Stand up, visitor. This is your hour.
Here is your map.
Choose your cradle. Ancient Egypt to
the right. Ancient Greece to
the left as the crow flies, if the crow flew,
but construction obstructs
its course so you’ll see it
strutting around, lost, making self-important caws
at the temporary walls
of empire.
What do I mean: “crow”? The boy from SVA?
The tourist? The teacher? The dramaturg?
School girl to whom the world has given such
a small skirt and such a tall
cold stool? Who
converges
in the Great Hall with me today? Sometimes
I worked the lines
handing out floor plans
just to get out from inside
the fact, but Information is a moveable
Desk. John F. Kennedy
Jr. asked me late one afternoon, “What time is it?”
and I had to tell him, “not much left
now”; we were
closing soon. He stood
there throbbing
like a metaphor. Son of the 20th
century whose vehicle
was powered by props.
The Great Poet once admonished me,
“You are reducing history to anecdote.”
“That’s more than you ever did!
Stop raising it
up to myth!” I would have liked to have stood in front
of Washington Crossing the Delaware
holding John-John by the hand
and told him
I once saw it carved
in a grain of rice.
Afterward I’d tuck the Stoic
in 80 yards of wine-dark imported
European textile in the low,
down bed in Gallery seven
oh nine, salute good night Medieval
America, and close the high-post
night curtain. In this/ lucid/ state of/
poem, /I ad/mit I’m/ having/ trouble/
envi/sioning/ the age/ of
John-John. Mother or
liaison; boy
or man. Thomas Hart whose bed we’re
in arrived on this land on a ship named
Desire. Who would identify
with the mother country or
dour country mother
variety of
Massachusetts witch, living
apron she who used her hands to wipe her
hands on, practical Ipswich wife to whom
this bed was left,
in this home,
willed father-to-son, out from under her?
Lying on the bed
I can feel the room’s dependency, its depth,
a percussive
loyalty stomping out a fire. And with
a little reach I can use my foot
to twitch the awful
oaken four-centuries-old cradle situated
beside me. Imagine
the oak tree overcoming the acorn-tragic
hunger hoarded by
a rodent.
Every tree is an
exception. The sturdy wood
has the self-regarding gloss
of old cabinetry turned
in anger,
contrived squarely in defiance, in the proportions
of a coffin; worse, this so-called
cradle
has a hood that leans a shadow
on the empty.
Every child thrives at the expense of someone
else’s. Though this is just a poem on the
subject of exhibition—a
double-blind
protection from statistics—here
I sing to John-John inside the cradle
inside this primary Period inside
the Period Rooms inside
the American
Wing inside this Museum. I am mothering a small man/
wifing a tremendous potential
child/ ovulating in the period room
and full of it:
Lust. Avarice.
Spite.
Destiny. Dynasty. Lice.
John-John John Kennedy Jr. wants to know
what time it is!
That’s the 20th century behind you, child man.
You can hide inside my skirt,
but it’s
a mini. What’s coming’s coming for you
from the sky.
There’s a luminous noonday shine
on the Information Desk
but it’s artifice: the Trustee’s Dining Room,
glows above like an
expensive, minor afterlife.
This morning I awoke to pounding deluge—
a furious heavenly manual type-
type-typing
outside my window that turned out
to be just
ice on the roof thawing
but I still call that rain, if from a lower
ceiling than I thought, and I can lower
my thinking yet,
to the museum subbasement
where rats mount a
rotating permanent exhibition
of excrement
among the white marble B-side nudes and
dated marble satyrs
that may or may not
ever see restoration or be
seen above again.
On the same topic of being,
“Wash me”
in the dust on the back fender of a moving car
is a traveling exhibition,
and of the several ways a tree
disperses seed
including: by wind-drift as an arrow or parachute or powder;
germinating afloat
upon water
in pockets of air
like naturally occurring
versions of the
pontoons that land the De Havilland Otter,
ready to root
riverside
where
the river takes them; clinging in infested feathers and matted
or glossy or soft or not soft fur
with the sad, dignified,
free-loading no-regret
barbs that inspired
the marvels of Velcro; ground under the hooves and paws
of anything that charges,
burrows, claws, herds, stampedes, is
led, leaps, or wanders
alone across or through or around rivers and ponds,
woods, fields and yellow acreage;
Dickensian or like
wired-martyrs, self-
detonating “in circumstances
beyond
the limits of acceptable fiction,”1
and then dispersed further, as in the case
of common dog violet, whose small shrapnel
gets scavenged by ants who spread it
incredible
relative distances
away from the places the seed pods exploded
by dropping a few here and here en route
to their hills, blazing
the earth
in inadvertent pathways of dog
violet further
inadvertently on-goingly dividing
through I don’t know how many ages
of home-going delegates of I don’t know
how many
ants; by the hoarding,
aforementioned, of acorns
by rodents or jays who are hunted
by predators, or by the scattering
of acorns
by my son and his friends
in circumstances that sometimes shock
me, send me running outside to ask them
to calm down, play gently, respect
one another as girls seem to—
though my sister and I were certainly
cruel to
each other and sometimes
strategic, when we played with acorns
play had to do with dolls serving
dolls from beautiful earthenware
art nouveau game dishes
fabricated in the acorn shape
of acorns, and
was never just
play with acorns themselves; some birds
in the thrush family
eat a kind of vivid berry
encapsulating a tiny adamantine
seedcase requiring
a hard-grinding gizzard
to wear it down and passes through
the mill of the thrush
as through history
belittled, belittled, and belittled
until belittlement is the freedom
awakening each seed in shit
in the alert procreative natural state
of revenge by which we will
outnumber you;
time is the best maneuver.
No better craftsman than
the clock inside heather,
a seeding that insinuates into the future
by investing in soil
and being turned on
by the temperature
of fire rolling above the moors
like a hell bent
plow. Overwhelming
undergoing, what infrastructure shifts
under this one?
When I slowly crossed the park after work at the
Information Desk my compass was
the Dakota where Polansky shot
the exteriors of Rosemary’s
Baby, but the interiors were shot brightly
inside my head.
Confused
museum goers sometimes asked, “Where
are the dinosaurs?” Depending on my mood:
“Across the park not
far away” or “That’s a good question,
they used to be
right here.”
1 George Lewes