En Vogue: A Relief
Endless chiseled experiments in cookery
ask of the omelet made with human hair
to dye tapioca the same shade as caviar.
Wilding women in Mexico pass mirrors unnoticed.
“You shouldn’t need to fake it,” erases in paint
the woman with horse hair hovering
within the hem of her invisible cloak. She is framed
amid the puns, the names and vases of tequila
by children frequenting a house
with animals playing about on the carpet.
God my guts keep bellowing, she seizes.
Yes, let’s, said the sound of creation’s
birds taking place in the fleshly room found
in the same home of the hem on the skirt
of a female figure painted by birds on the wall
that beheld her fresco. They came to life on paper
and flew through the window and out.
Their images still go there to express
a woman’s indiscretion. Shadows
of a lonely woman
of a lovely woman
trap passersby in the Geranium Estate’s highest tower
left to care alone for cageling moons, each to each.
Maternity therein blossoms a landscape
mummified before them. As a debutante she stood
lounging up at the light that falls behind the lines
soldiering men who shoot pellets into abdomens.
She fashions fallout long before it’s fashionable
to defend. With photographs of dolls, the Leonardos pose
in their grins. Their architecture rises, closes in the story
of humans called legendmythahistory. The cuts crawl
deep with their oldest friends, inebriated
by the flailing ages of death gases.
The grass lies down, quietly feral.
With faces cracked in the fractured pavement,
the future’s flower towered beneath the glass of their feet,
appearing only in reflection’s post-mortem concrete.
Which is to say, the cracks made way for the moon’s silhouette,
her skirts to rustle seed bearers out, the nether regions
of those with no whistle, no war, no house but a home
where they buried it. The women would look up
from the rapes to cull the pennies called sparrows.
The beasts of midnight held party to the pieces of blasts
apart and sunk them to fallow ground, the small deaths
to wallow in. The country of birth befriended her face
to say adios as always. Life, the fear of living, begins in the soil
of a deaf public protracted from tomorrow.
Thus the Madonna’s Bedtime Story
remotely soups with buttery sky pulled in by her shades
from the world’s largest orb in progress.
In the paint off canvas, they stood apart from
les femmes enfants and muses who stir with ladles. Fin.
| Amy King |
|
levelheaded: En Vogue: A Relief
The verb phrases “ask of” and “to dye” are simple enough alone, but when paired up as in the first three lines of this poem, they make for a jarring and ambiguous opening sentence. Who is doing the asking? The “chiseled experiments”? Is the omelet expected “to dye”? Just as the sentence raises these questions, it introduces us to the poem’s knack for turning disparate elements into highly charged, fluid images. In this case, the confluence of “cookery,” “omelet,” “human hair,” and “dye” sets up an overlapping duality between domesticity and primal beauty, between “lonely” and “lovely,” that extends through the poem.
Another serpentine sentence begins with “Yes, let’s, said the sound of creation’s / birds […]” Like the poem’s opening sentence, these lines create a complex image – one of “creation’s birds” painting and “taking place” on a female figure. Again, it’s tough to put together precisely what the birds are doing, but deciding what’s going on is not the point. Instead the sentence allows less-than-concrete relationships to form between thematically connected words and images. The sentence’s “hem,” “fresco,” and “fleshly room” come together in an evocation of something particular, something that defies paraphrase but points our thoughts and emotions in a general direction.
So what is that general direction? The poem presents a dual image of the woman or women of the poem, hence the poem’s designation as “a relief.” It does so most overtly with the aforementioned couplet “of a lonely woman / of a lovely woman,” changing a single letter and changing the entire sentiment of the line. But it does so most beautifully and subtly in the line “The grass lies down, quietly feral,” where a metaphoric grass disassociates wildness from violence, allowing quiet and femininity its place in nature, in a world populated by “soldiering men who shoot pellets into abdomens.”
Really though, “En Vogue: A Relief” is an enormous poem. It is a poem that lets “Madonna’s Bedtime Story” (which contains the line “Words are useless, especially sentences”) live next to the belittled “Leonardos.” It is a poem that moves from a domestic scene (“a house / with animals playing about on the carpet”) to “a deaf public protracted from tomorrow” that suggest historic horrors through the poem’s evocation of contemporary horrors. It is a poem that fulfills its own portmanteau, “legendmythahistory.”
– The Editors
