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L’Assemblée Nationale
i.
It hung
in my mind, a cloud of promising metallic qualities.
A metal
frame stretched out, an umbrella’s skeleton flared
to
introduce suction and assemblage:
Women
at work on truths untied and forever reframed
with
perpetual interruption. Cascading green velvet
and
chocolate thread; moreover, stares cruising past, walk signals on and blinking.
ii.
Women
behind women, Russian doll clapped over a doll against dolls. A student walked in and asked the boss if I—and not the others—
would
teach her to scan a heart all morning. Ultrasound it.
Of
course,
I said, right as
a
doctor who’d given birth to six children stood outside
the
boss’ door to say she disliked
a
too-bright quality in my work.
In a
dark lab, I leaned my hand on top of the student’s
and
showed her that her death grip on the probe
kept
the camera tucked firmly under the fourth rib
and
would never focus a good picture for her. Heart windows diverse,
she had
to sweep the wand over a patient’s ribs—
like a
gaze ranging a whole store
for a
walk identifiable
in lack
of
loping, or side to side,
its
person wearing known khakis, slow toss of hair.
iii.
When
she was four,
my
mother crawled, a secret,
down
one arrondissement, across a bridge,
knees
down another cobblestone mile
Germans
sniping from the top of L’Assemblée Nationale
the
largest building downtown.
Thunder
roll of bombardment or not, her mother crawled above her,
mother
an arms and legs shelter,
her own
doll held beneath.
iv.
That's
enough,
she
never said to little me
that's
enough,
stop looking in the tin
at a
stack of identical sweets.
She
knew one day I’d learn my own enough
and
gaze – a bright enough – would
fill the space
around
each fog, brick, and soft face arriving.
v.
When
language throws out the last
heel of
bread, failing to break your purpose;
when
speechless, I've likely seen a brand of mother—say,
a
many-faced Picasso—red, framed, grandly lit, and known
beyond
the hundred sweating heads.
Her
white face, each disfigured eye stuck wild
on a
green drift means the mother leaving, her child
quiet
behind a door, human instinct on her many lips,
crimsons burning around the stillest face.
Night Available
We pass
over a long bridge being
built
while we ride it, your favorite incidental
pasture
of goats to the side. That picture—
goats
up a tree—recalled from the web,
while
birds sew a long thread that spells
red and
brown. My hair, too long, decides
in the
rearview to look eternal or sage, as if
warning
you never know what you’ll wake to.
There’s
no way back from this story to the real goats. A stylist snips and a woman
claims
her children three and five more
animal
than human, then pays. I sit,
the
stylist combs my hair to a peak. I flash
on a
desiccated body, a marble foyer
but
don’t scream. The stylist pulls my hair down,
snips
it blue wet & straight across.
What
sweep, what an arena, available imagination:
dead
bodies, birds sewing trees, a thought
where
you appear as my co-worker and scold me
about
my large city of glue gunned Styrofoam
when in
real life I rub your arm often.
The
goats aren’t really up that tree. Scissors
click,
hair falls through air. Having received
sophisticated instructions immediately to lie down,
the
hair looks flung. It starts a quiet wave,
incidental hair of a child whose whole mien says
almost. These abstractions grow impossible.
Perfection forms its slow lies, flops to one
region
of pillow; hair awry like a cow tongue
as it
lathers. I fall asleep and I keep this to myself:
I
asked the barber for dog ears.
And keep to myself—
always
there’s night available for darting words
singing
there’s some other version you don’t see.
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