Taste of Cherry (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry | e di t or Hilda Raz unive r sit y of n eb ra s ka p res s | Lincoln and London

Taste of Cherry |

Kara Candito

© 2009 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. ∞ Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data Candito, Kara. Taste of cherry / Kara Candito. p. cm. — (Prairie schooner book prize in poetry) isbn 978-0-8032-2523-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) I. Title. ps3603.a537t37 2009 811'.6 — dc22 2009009142 Set in Adobe Garamond Pro. Designed by A. Shahan.

Contents vii

Acknowledgments

One 3

Self-Portrait with an Ice Pick

La Bufera: Our Last Trip to Sicily

5

Floristic Elegy for the Year I Lived with You in Coconut Grove

8

Notes for a Novice Flâneur

10

Postcard: I’ve Been Meaning to Write — Egypt Journal: The Poet’s Condition Egypt Journal: Christmas at the Great Pyramid

16

Carnivale, 1934

21

Two Epic Poem Concerning the Poet’s Coming of Age as Attis Gilead Red

28

Girl in the Grass

31

22

14

12

Three Taste of Cherry

39

Barely Legal: Upon Finding My Father’s Porn A Necessary Fiction

44 45

He Was Only Half as Beautiful 47

California

Sleeping with René Magritte Polarity

49

52

Strange Zippers: A Poem in Which the Heroine _______ The Fitting

54

60

On the Occasion of Our Argument During a vh1 Best Power Ballads Countdown Last Happiness Notes

67

65

63

42

Acknowledgments Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals in which versions of these poems have appeared or are forthcoming: Best New Poets 2007: “Carnivale, 1934” Blackbird: “La Bufera: Our Last Trip to Sicily,” “Polarity,” “Self-Portrait with an Ice Pick,” “Taste of Cherry” The Florida Review: “Floristic Elegy for the Year I Lived with You in Coconut Grove,” “Last Happiness” Gulf Coast: “Egypt Journal: Christmas at the Great Pyramid,” “Egypt Journal: The Poet’s Condition” Prairie Schooner: “Epic Poem Concerning the Poet’s Coming of Age as Attis,” “Sleeping with René Magritte” “Egypt Journal: Christmas at the Great Pyramid” is for Ghazi Al-Mulaifi; “Taste of Cherry” is for Tracy K. Smith and our summer 2006 Brooklyn workshop; “On the Occasion of Our Argument During a vh1 Best Power Ballads Countdown” is for Erin Belieu. Thank you to my wonderful parents for their unwavering support over the years. To all the friends who’ve made me see the world and myself differently—Becky Lehmann, Liz Countryman, Ghazi Al-Mulaifi, Christine Eck, Kim Conlon, Colin Lessig, Shannon Brennan, Kat Devlin, and Tom Zukoski. To Erin Belieu, whose insight, wit, and intelligence helped to shape this book. To Stan Plumly, Josh Weiner, Michael Collier, and David Wyatt for honoring me with their wisdom and patience. To Tracy K. Smith and Enrique Alvarez for teaching me duende. To Lia Purpura, Jane Satterfield, and Barbara Hamby for their support and encouragement. And to my gatitos, Cassidy and Saturn, for being themselves.

|

vii

Taste of Cherry

One | “Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.” a n n e ca rs on, Autobiography of Red

Self-Portrait with an Ice Pick

Imagine the impact — wrecking ball, welcome injury or collision, like some secret screamed in a late night taxi. And while it was happening, bile rising and the blind urge of its happening — the ice pick striking the white wall of the freezer, the neon sign glowing through the window like a red undertow, a sliver of the street corner where Essex looked like Sex Street and a low winter sun vignetted the room, the wedding band left on the nightstand because betrayal was a tender industry then; siempre its one urgent slogan. There was the mind’s syncopation — fractured, freezer-burnt, mesmerized by the shards of ice that ricocheted across the floor; cuts covering the knuckles and a hole finally carved out, big enough for the bottle of vodka where Van Gogh’s wheat fields trembled. What the body wanted was its penance; scar, reminder that I could love anyone, gnash my teeth on their shoulder, then forget them in the subway car, the stale air and grime of it, metal bar still warm from a stranger’s hand and the shock, almost erotic, of being jostled by so many limbs. Follow it back to that bar where the drinks

|

3

had lovely Storyville names — Chloe, Justine, Simone; names like a girl on a swing with her hair blown back; espresso, nutmeg, chambord, grenadine; flower petals ground down to powder; names I stumbled through that year when my one job in the world was to smile in a way that meant, Say something interesting and I might stay for five minutes. I remember Alex, the Bellini-eyed waiter lighting a match, flicking his wrist like a gambler drawing fate closer. I remember walking home past empty fruit crates and the truncated frames of bikes still locked to street signs. Helicopters circling the East River, like a repeated phrase. There was no aubade, just sunlight breaking the bones behind my eyes. What the body wanted was a blank room; its own pain, untranslated, self-contained. If I can see myself there, it’s my eye in the windowpane, hazel speck reflected back against a daze of sirens.

4

|

La Bufera |

Our Last Trip to Sicily I have seen, in the stained-glass windows through the flowers of the mullioned panes, a country of skeletons filter in — and a lip of blood grow muter, speechless. montale

Surely, no one could fall out of love here, where the dhoni drop off from the pier like drowsy relay runners and the air is smeared with orange blossoms, their strong, nuptial smell, instinctive as a first language. And though I tried that night that we sat at the wobbly table in the restaurant where old arguments began to interest us again, I could not pronounce the word for napkin: tovagliolo. And though the waitress smiled with her mouth, I could tell she was annoyed by the treason of my name, Candito, which means sweet candy shell and is, like so many things, an accident of translation — my grandfather trading Candido, pure white light, for a child’s Easter treat, the pastel shell that shrouds an almond. My grandfather, who often said, Pisciaci supra i ruini prima ca diventinu muschei; Piss on the ruins before they build another temple, would have laughed even when waves pelted the olive grove that night and the lights quivered as if an uncertain country of skeletons were slipping in —

|

5

the marzipan birds like empty hands, the spongy skin of the priests in the square. He would have laughed when we returned to the baglio, emboldened and drunk, to fuck on the ancient floor and pass out with spumante fizzing over the sides of our glasses and the windows flung open without wondering how bright, how final the Strait of Messina must have looked that morning in 1938 when he left for good. • • •

In the morning, I woke mouthing the syllables, to-vag-li . . . trying to make them work, when I heard you from the other end of a tunnel: Take a hot shower. You’ll feel better. Then, falling through the shower door with nothing to break the fall but my skull and a soaked towel. You said it felt like film noir, finding me naked on my side with one eye clenched as if in vigorous prayer and the other, wilder eye fluttering, the lashes beating around the still center of the dilated world. What a loud noise, I thought, collapsing into that damp, black sphere in my brain, like the well in Orvieto, the one you wouldn’t follow me into, collapsing into that dream I keep having — a man standing on a chair, a noose, a loose locket hanging from his neck. He wants me to kick the chair out from under his feet. At first I refuse, but he’s grabbing my arm. I kick hard. I want to make him sorry. One of those moments that caves in under examination — your careful, clinical hands prodding my ribs for injuries. Bruises welling up, like the flush of sex, or the sudden flare of what goes unsaid.

6

|

I know my mouth was filled with blood and that when I tried to speak you moaned as if you could feel it too, the tooth pierced through my bottom lip. And pain became the vantage point, the spot where I still stand watching the morning grow wilder, already half in love with the ruined picture and the body’s offer to pay for everything — a mute, bloody mouth, a snapped neck, as if damage were its own currency, as if regret were ever the right reason to return.

|

7

Floristic Elegy for the Year I Lived with You in Coconut Grove

Call it intermission. Call it caught on the wrong end of long distance love. This was Miami, city where you could get a green card or good head without trying too hard. I learned quickly: if at first it doesn’t make sense, improvise or change the story. The air heavy with hibiscus and the emphasis of appearance over history. We studied the ideas of ourselves, studiously. You, the enamorer. Me, adrift on that sea of clever. There were meteor showers at midnight on the first of the month and the girls on Ocean Drive were trampling the night for love; everyone saved by some ambition. Roberto, with his troupe of cage dancers, lovely boys dressed up for the closeted ceos cruising Flamingo Park — the Ricardos, the Alejandos — names like mint leaves that curled and came apart in your mouth. Do you remember that night at the club with the ridiculous grass dance floor? The b-movie actor who painted me Goa blue beside the pool, where oleander blossoms floated on faux lily pads? We were laughing when I snapped the straps of the hostess’s dress like the stems

8

|

of lady slippers, those rare, delicate flowers; laughing when a minor red sun rose over the causeway, over The Opium Garden and Cloud 9; a Russian model nursing her nosebleed in a stranger’s backseat. Even now, I’m afraid of daylight’s salt kiss, blue rain falling inside the transparent wall, the way we let ourselves ignore the drug boats bobbing on the horizon, the cigarette burns on the cage dancer’s arm, the fifteen-year-old boy who got sunstroke and hiv at the White Party; and bruises, toxic, luminous as a man-o-war, covering my back in the morning. Sometimes, thinking of you alone or never alone in that city, I want to wipe the street murals clean with my hands, scrub at the soot with ice until the colors embarrass the winter sky with their demands. Tonight, a man and a woman huddling against the wind to light a cigarette, might let the match fall. They might stare mesmerized at the oleander blossoms floating toward the pool filter — slowly, single file, as if trying not to panic.

|

9

Notes for a Novice Flâneur The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. walter benjamin

Of course, the pull of the window displays — the glitzy chain-link of Chanel scarves, the shrewd serenity of papier-mâché cranes stuffed into champagne flutes. And do not repress the thrill, vaguely sexual, of knowing that somewhere beyond the windows’ mise-en-scene, or blended in like an artificial god in camouflage, there is an industrial fan making a mimicry of tropical wind, flattening a silk bandeau across the mannequin’s nipples, which are hard and unapologetic as the eyes of a stranger that follow you up Madison Avenue, where breath from the subway grating rushes up your bare legs and the day’s momentum begins to pass through you — the spring wind lifting skirts, hands lifting suitcases from the curb, the trunk of a cab flapping like a slack, sleeping mouth all the way to the Queensboro Bridge.

10

|

Try to think of all this as a seduction. A tourist trap or attraction . . . the self ’s stuttering between the holy pornography of marketplace and passing glance. You might laugh to feel the street stripped of associations — that square of sidewalk in front of Nat Sherman, where you once hit a married woman with your broken umbrella, might stare back with some sense of mute irony until you can agree that it would have ended anyway: her contempt for Alphabet City, your fear of subterfuge. But, if you notice a box of Hamiltons in the window and remember how lovely she looked running her thin hand along the lid each time she lit one; and how you never felt alone that winter, even when you weren’t with her in that high room, where the city spread out behind you like an afterthought and the endless lights on in the all-night offices were just lights and your skin was not permeable; then later, when you notice the 180-thousand-calorie dark chocolate Christ in the lobby of the Waldorf, let yourself remember the runaway kid on the subway, the one who grinned and told you that once, when he was an altar boy in a southern town, he stole shopping bags full of the Host and ran through the neighborhood tossing wafers, scattering the sacrament on thresholds and flagstones, over the windshields of parked cars and the tarps covering propane grills — how he swears to this day that all he wanted was to see the whole street blessed.

|

11

Postcard |

I’ve Been Meaning to Write —

because it’s August in an ancient city and I want to tell you about this heat that hangs like the mind of a landscape in which everything is still and irritable as the stray cats that nap on the ruins of Pompey’s theatre. Because the man who served my espresso this morning looked like you. In a certain light, I peered through the bronze keyhole and saw the Basilica framed by fire. Because I miss you even as I try to efface you, like the lunatic who smashed David’s genitals with a hammer. Beauty is an anesthesia here. It dulls the brain. I write; it’s called memory, then story. It never resembles the real things I want to say when the wind is still and fountains rush around the night. My apartment is dark and laundry hangs in sad heaps on the balcony. There are chicken bones in the sink. Below, in the Piazza, a gelateria. At night, families arrive — men holding their sons high, like props; women blowing smoke in imperfect circles and whispering behind manicured hands about their husbands’ affairs. So many minor betrayals (the urge to sleep through church bells). The Triumph of Galatea, on the reverse, is short and coarse. Recall that it ends in bloodshed. I think Raphael understood that no one wants to be Polyphemus, the one who sees 12

|

her eyes as little spurs in his sides and suffers and hides. We all want to be Galatea, laughing sidelong, smirking over her shoulder at a suitor’s clumsy song. Such a small offense. And doesn’t it make her beautiful? So, grief becomes the punishment for ridicule and justice is its own rapture — a boulder hurled, a river pounding a hollow cave in the head. I can’t forget your studio, the one on the side street, with sealed windows. Everything inside cheap and new or abandoned and broken. On the wall, a still life of overripe fruit in a wooden frame. How you envied the voluptuous grapes, the way they burst over the rim of the bowl —

|

13

Egypt Journal |

The Poet’s Condition

When the evening wind starts to blow south from Asia and on the radio, Umm Kulthoum, the Egyptian Billie Holiday, aches out a song about the callused thumbs of memory, about being a barefoot girl from the Delta; when the man I love twists the ice tray twice, and drops three cubes into my hibiscus, I remember the ménage a trois I wanted, but talked myself out of one hazy night in college and leaving him at the table with Turkish coffee and cardamom seeds, I walk bare-sleeved where the guidebook says danger and the street is a garish human theatre, the bazaar a winepress of cheap consolation prizes — stuffed plastic camels and bright, slippery beads that say why wonder at this time of night how the belly dancers slam their finger cymbals so hard, yet habitually, why their skin burns, so perfectly flawed like the cracks in the pyramids in morning sun, how they paint their eyes that high, sexual black that makes the fundamentalists, who are tugging their beards somewhere, rabid to stop this dance that celebrates simply the body’s light, which is the din of a hundred conversations in a small room, as if all of Gezira swallowed a radio, as if the Nile parted like legs of phosphorescent light that I follow into the center of the center of the city, as in storm, where everything is still as the wall Saladin built around the Citadel, a place of clean lines

14

|

and the crusaders’ captured sighs, where he could rest and where I stop tonight to search for my face, or anything familiar in the sky, in the dirty moon, I am thinking, How small I am; I am thinking, I will write this down.

|

15

Egypt Journal |

Christmas at the Great Pyramid

You say the desert wind is romantic, stripping sand from the pyramids and lifting little red pom-poms from the camels’ saddles, but behind us a skyline of smashed houses, narrow alleys where women peer through keyhole eyes and fill gaunt stores with their perfumes. It’s true I think too much about the shape hidden lips make to consider the price of colored beads, but how can I help but imagine when sand, its slow assault, the way it seeps into ears and eyes and mouth, makes me insatiable? In the museum, the pharaohs’ molars look like blunt stumps worn down, a gradual giving over to gum and bone. If Egypt is the mother of the world, then all of her children must be Coriolanus, wearing their scars the way brides wear henna — proud and punch-drunk, half in awe of their hard-earned adornment. But, look. Here comes a tour bus and a crowd of Thai tourists in red t-shirts. Pretty girls from the Gulf want the camels to gallop please, so Yalla. There are many kinds of deprivation. For example, the whole world tastes like sand today; in this country it is illegal to say, I believe in evolution — and if you say it, there is no pendulum, no bare bulb swinging across the interrogation room and sometimes there isn’t even a body.

16

|

Maybe a little boy waits in a makeshift apartment on the rooftop of a downtown building this morning, watching a single cloud undress over the Nile, like the reed our guide drags in the air over the sand to show us a cobra’s undulating path, because snakes are symbols of luck and magic here. The cobra curls around the cooking pot and it isn’t hard to understand why what’s deadly isn’t so awful after all, once you accept the thing slithering in the yard of the mind, like the sketches of venereal diseases in the doctor’s office in Khan Khalili — blisters and sores as dangerous as Israeli missiles, each one an argument against lust, which is a kind of curiosity. And maybe, this is the story of wanting to know (if Nefertiti ever washed the quicklime from her hair, how the crocodiles have always buried themselves in the mud in Lake Nasser), but enjoying the details of deprivation. So, when the camel sits down and I have to lean back and tug on the reins to keep from falling, it is hard not to laugh the way I laughed once during a wedding sermon when the priest said, Only the stupid man builds his house on the sand. I want to remember you with your ankles crossed around the hump of a camel, explaining that the Bedouin call them ships of the desert, even as you send text messages in three languages to your friends in Brooklyn. I am laughing because later all that will remain

|

17

of this place are the sores blooming beneath the camel’s saddle, the bomb mirrors they swept beneath the car each time we returned to the hotel, and what your father said when we were introduced, the part you didn’t translate, which I understood: Ayoon otta. Cat eyes. And later, when you explained his question: How can you trust a woman with eyes like an animal that is loyal to no one?

18

|

Two | Portraits

Carnivale, 1934

Burlesque Dancer Tell me about the Badlands, where we hid in the dry riverbed and whispered deluge until our breath filled the cracked cups. How it was dark when we dug up the baby and wrapped him like a little papoose again. It wasn’t like headlights, the seams they left on the side of the road. It was more like the dotted lines I drew down my sister’s calves where stockings belonged. How it was hot in the tent and we put peacock feathers in our hair and danced until we forgot the men’s hands in the matinee. How we swore we’d drive out to Los Angeles where the fog unzips its white dress, and I’d learn to dance like Shirley Temple. Smile and slap my dimples. Look at the girl splayed out on the dusty stage. Look at the stars, at Orion unbuckling himself. That means we’re in Cheyenne, that means we’ll never see the coast. Tell me the things you say to yourself when there are stray dogs at the edge of every town.

|

21

Epic Poem Concerning the Poet’s Coming of Age as Attis

1. A Brief Introduction to the Cold, Hard Truth I like to watch the last scene of Easy Rider over and over, genuflecting before the T.V. in my parent’s room. I like to watch it until the world dissembles like air after an apology. Shots from the car window. Burst of body and fire and metal. Then, the long river that folds and folds like the house after a party. Card table and T.V. trays with wine stains on the presidents’ faces, towels left in the yard. I make my father’s belt rack spin around. Please don’t fold me, the mouth says into the mirror. 2. Schemes of Domination In school, they teach us about conquistadores, men who stepped ashore and said mine. Cortez could stare a king in the eye and lie lie lie. We learn about explorers who slept under the stars with savages and snakes. Claimed the continent, then left on their sissy ships for Spain. I would’ve stayed here. Fuck honor. I would’ve stayed here, speared 22

|

grizzly bears and kept three brown women. What is brave? Summer grapes deflate into raisins. I jerk off on the school bus with my backpack across my lap. Right when I come, the bus driver glares into the rearview mirror and shouts, No pushing and shoving back there! 3. Slaughterhouse — what the gym teachers smile and say on rainy days when the field outside is washing away. I fold my arms at the penalty line then run fast as I can across the parquet while football players who call each other faggot fire rubber balls the color of scabs at my legs. 4. Beneath the Surface There Are 1,000 Tiny Explosions, Son My father lifts the hood. We stare, my brother and I, at a world of wires and the lesson he gives means we’re almost men. With a twig, he points out the parts. Radiator. Carburetor. The words slam around inside our mouths

|

23

and everything — the oil stains on his hands, my mother calling from the kitchen window, Lynyrd Skynyrd singing about how to be a simple man — everything comes crashing down when we say the right words. He closes the hood. Beneath it, a named world. 5. Family Romance that Ends with the Suspension of Habeas Corpus My father pushes his plate to the center of the table. My sister and mother clear while my brother slumps in his chair like Hank Williams. I sneak upstairs into my sister’s room, crouch in the closet. There are roller skates, too many pairs of shoes, the smell of school. She walks in and slips a pink sweater over her head. She is as beautiful as Nepal, as all of my secrets. Every night, I watch her; my sister touching her tits in front of the mirror to see if they’ve grown. My ass hurts from her heels. Why do I watch her? Worship is the word my mother used once. That was before. One night, they catch me. It’s funny, really — my father beating me for wanting to fuck my sister. He cannot say, Son, I know you want to fuck your sister. After this, I look

24

|

at naked magazines. But, every night before I fall asleep, I see her. My love stuck inside the body of my sister, curled like smoke from a bashful chimney. My beautiful girl waiting, wanting me. She doesn’t know yet the shape of my face in the dark. 6. Etymology For a while, I like how words open and close inside my mouth. Scabs in crook of knee, crook of elbow. They break open when I’ve forgotten about them. Brave and red, made of what we hide. Words bleeding out onto the dry, brown lawn. 7. The Twilight of Universals, or What Happens If Her Shadow Starts to Grow? Her name is Sophie and she knows a lot of fancy words for weather — cumulus, cooling trend. Her nose bleeds when the barometer falls. Squid-shaped stains, red-brown, on the pillowcase. I’d like to stay here for a year, maybe more, in her room. Her father out bowling with his ass crack and his friends, a bottle of Colt 45 rolling around in the bed of his pick-up. Her sister downstairs breastfeeding her bastard kid in the recliner. Out back, the field where she tickled the soft spot

|

25

under my chin with Queen Anne’s Lace. My hand’s between her legs. How many stoplights are turning red right now across Montana? 8. Hush, Can You Hear the Cries Beating Against the Window of the Wedding? Sister, I saw you knocked up and living in a singlewide on the other side of the river. Dust devils and the sagging porch, dirty kids and cars with their parts pulled out all over the yard. Knocked up and smoking in the grey glow of talk shows. Some stranger’s singlewide on the other side of the river. Why did you run away, sister? 9. Escape Velocity I’m not good in school, so I make lists in my head to pass the time: seven sounds skipping stones make; eight ways to pop poison ivy blisters; what I’d like to do to her. But then I get a hard-on big as the eraser the kiss-asses clap on the steps. I don’t ask questions. I don’t believe in happy endings. My friend’s mother died of tb and now his father keeps his sister inside all day, afraid she might run away. At night, when my parents fight, I stay pressed to the television. The newscaster 26

|

says there are hostages in Iran. What keeps us here? I asked her once in late spring, the grass still sun-warmed under our feet. Alone in my bed, I swear I can hear them breaking the horses, their high, human cries. Dark barns no one claims to own. 10. In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni My two cousins, convex, colorless in the blank T.V. screen, squint at my back. One carved his own initials into his arm and has to wear long sleeves all summer. You’re supposed to use a girl’s, his sister says, scowling in pink makeup, thick like a second face. One night, I throw eggs at her Trans Am and blame the neighbors. One night, her brother ties one end of a rope around the stump of an elm. Ties the other around his neck. Runs hard until it snaps. I admire this. It moves like strong wind into my secret life. It spins the weathervane pitched in the flattened fortress of my brain. It stirs the air behind my eyes. Awake now, I roll down the hill beside the river. Gravity, it grinds my bones. Time saws off. Nothing here, but truth and hot.

|

27

Gilead Red After Margaret Atwood

These things I’ve come to crave — the flicker of magazine pages, the way bare legs feel on hot vinyl; cellulite cream, the smell of chlorine on everything; and love, like a swimming pool I could not dive into. All the while, shiny open-faced across my lap, the instruments of my incarnation — Glamour, Shape, Allure. The endless shades of lipstick with names like injuries — gash, asphyxia, big bang. What we had before were freedom and sex. A prolonged agreement to rub up against the ideal. They say we are safe now. Freedom from decision. Permission to lie on our backs and conjure the rain.

28

|

My Commander gives me a hand mirror. He gives me a name and a second-hand dress. I pull it over my head. I go into the blank light which is waiting and fold my hands there, propped at the edge of a hotel bed like Hopper’s woman. I have lived through the fumbling on late night buses, the old arguments of strange zippers clicking out delay, delay, delay. Now, I turn my body into anyone’s prayer. We wear wings around our eyes here, white in the reddest red of someone else’s night, which is a placeholder, a series of X’s on the calendar, the hottest week of summer. The tulips lose their teeth all over the yard. They say, Try to understand. There were too many flavors on the tongue, half-colors, too many choices. All flesh begins here. If what you want is another metaphor, as in Immaculate Conception, I have none. Or maybe, all day his wife trims the fruiting bodies of flowers

|

29

with gardening shears and I wonder what it feels like — her hand, hot in the oversized glove, the ground beneath her knees, buried things bursting upwards. I want the day plucked back like petals from the stem, each one redder than the one before. Summer garden. Some are wardens. Some are slitting their throats in bathroom stalls. Some want to live. We call it survival. This story about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.

30

|

Girl in the Grass Women only use other people’s codes of honour. faulkner

1. Caddy in Therapy I was born in a harness of camphor and pear blossom. Go on. My mother was weak, but she believed in absolutes, as in a woman is either a lady or not. I took long walks and said the word vestibule to no one. There was a lady slipper beneath the scrub pine, a vein above my stocking in the shape of omega. Tell me about your first time. I wanted to know what he was thinking — crossing uncrossing his legs, leaning against the trunk of a tree. His tongue flickered just once through his teeth and it was a delicate thing. The loveliest ones are cunning and serene. You’re lying.

|

31

I could feel the body breaking, the buzzards in the ditch undressing the horse’s bones, so don’t talk to me about the sorry ends of women. Leda in the bushes, whimpering and moaning for the swan. Just bear with me while I assemble this fireside mythology because all of it must mean something — the month of brides, the open blade of my brother’s knife. His voice genuflecting in my ear, breath traveling across a mirror. Yes? You think if you listen long enough you might understand anaphora? Men and their codes of honor, the minute clicking of little wheels that says summer again and honeysuckle. Here is the vine. Here are the nauseous berries. Here is the blade against my breast. Here is the nectar, so sweet it stings the tongue and the sound of ticking, the long diminishing parade of everything that was. Go on. You think it will dull the pain, doctor, if I whisper his name into your dark ear? 32

|

2. Caddy on Dalton Ames He could name all of the constellations, so I wanted to sleep with him. He had this way of staring without really staring, sidelong, as if it were the easiest thing in the world to watch shadows grow like fat arrows in the stream. It was wordless, really. A series of slight conciliations. Cassiopeia circling herself. I thought of my childhood dress flung on the bank of the branch, my muddy drawers drifting downstream, washing up somewhere south of New Orleans. There was this girl at school. One of her earlobes had been bitten off by her horse, Guinevere. I could see the raised scars from stitches, the places where the ear had been sewn back together again.

|

33

3. Caddy Remembers Adolescence Sometimes it’s hard to start with the obvious. I was easily embarrassed. Even when narcissus grew in the pasture, dew ran down my legs. When it rained, I couldn’t sleep. I hated the feel of newspaper beneath my bare feet. I hated the way my mother looked blowing kisses at the top of the stairs. I was seduced by petals crowning through the frost. And I believed, foolishly, that the sweat between my breasts could solve anything. Try explaining whole years spent swallowing the springtime grass, swallowing the smell of honeysuckle. Dalton squeezed my nipples. Quentin held his breath. Dalton zipped his fly, pushed me goodbye. I remember the squirrels’ dirge in the high branches — ancient sounds that came from another place, like locusts before the sun burns out stars.

34

|

4. Miss Quentin’s First Oxymoron, at Age Fourteen You’re pretty ugly, he says, but you’ve got nice tits. It is April, it is raining, big drops that won’t stick. Dear Sticking Place, are you fond of small things? Lily pads and perfume bottles and moonbeams. Do you like pretty words? Circus tent. Parlor door. Do you blush in doorways behind Lady Macbeth? You’re not like the pins grandmother wears — peacocks chasing their own tails — you’re more like my uncle folding his arms at the table, shaking his head when I come home late and red in the face. Well, well, well, what do we have here?

|

35

5. Dead Letter: Miss Quentin Addresses Her Mother That was a dream. I think you were the ringmaster. I was a tightrope walker in a tiara, smitten with a canary perched on a wire. Falling wasn’t so bad, mother, except I crushed my crown. Did you ever dance sitting down? The branches of the pear tree rasp and scrape against the window at night. Flames lick your letters, like so many small sighs. I know you can’t see me. I know the stars are rhinestones. I follow him through shadowy places where words come out and perfume.

36

|

Three | “What a bore to say ‘dearest body’ and ‘dearest heart.’” a rt h ur ri m b au d, Illuminations

Taste of Cherry

1. There is no way to tell this story. How she said, Come with me, and you did, you followed her into the bed of a stolen truck, into that bar where you shot the bartender and made everyone watch while you kissed her hard and pulled the wilted orchids from her hair. Threw them to the bloodstained floor. How you wanted something dark and dramatic. Chamber music at the circus. And she was so lovely, sharpening her knife, shifting from one foot to the other in the glare of headlights. How her breath was close and hot against your ear and you learned to stitch a love scene from the shredded night. 2. Maybe you should start with the boring part. Before the chase scene, before Bonnie and Bonnie dropped acid and swallowed their tongues, before they fell into deep, inexplicable fucked-up love,

|

39

you were cutting yourself on the bathroom floor, crying in front of the mirror because the tears felt more real when you watched them fall into the sink where the jagged hairs your father shaved from his face the night before made a halo around the drain. You were dreaming of stilettos and fast cars, a shove-me-hard-up-against-the-wall kind of love. You were not dreaming of undressing in the back of a truck halfway to Baja with a warm beer between your legs and her hair, the best kind of blindfold, wrapped like night around your eyes. 3. Every story takes a wrong turn. Those donuts you did, laughing in the parking lot of the police station, the blood that stained your shirt no matter how hard you scrubbed. How you said the wrong things over and over until she hated you. Maybe you shouldn’t have broken a bottle over that guy’s head. You always tried to turn the smallest gestures into a lesson, like that time you wore the I love my pussy shirt to church. Maybe you should have never touched her. Grinned and sat on your hands that day in the planetarium under Ursa Minor. But, you wanted a love like an air raid, all sirens and red explosions.

40

|

In the morning, the charred remains of everything that came before. You wanted more scenes in which death is narrowly averted and everyone dances naked in the rain, their bodies no longer afterthoughts. 4. It began like every sweet, false myth. There was a pop song on the jukebox. A broken bottle on the bar. The stars were arranged in rows, like obedient children, girls. Pressed up against her, you felt safe and warm. You knew what would happen next. The snake ready to strike, the bullet finding a body. Night. The taste of cherry. This is the astral plane, this is the spirit world, she says and draws a heart on the dirt floor with her finger.

|

41

Barely Legal |

Upon Finding My Father’s Porn

Though the blonde who mashes her face against a pillow and groans harder does not look like me, I press myself here before the sixty-inch flat screen, mute emissary to this masculine world which is paved with scab-colored leather and paintings of fairways; equipped with pool table, universal remote control and Nat Sherman cigars at the end of the bar . . . all the props of play. Difference weaves a way of thinking, a way of understanding that I once apprenticed myself to these girls; to their deliberate rocking, as if cock were the metronome that keeps the song in time, while the instruments, tortured or bored, hammer out their little mimicries of pleasure. It was the summer we turned fifteen, when Abby and I sat in the dark with the neighborhood boys watching her father’s porn, paying clinical attention to all the directives of impersonating passion — the body projected, its positions mastered, until each time the hand opened, the mind said, This is your hand. How does it look? And the night

42

|

of the botched strip poker game, we stood in the living room in our underwear with the amnesiac hum of the refrigerator at our backs; genuflecting before us, boys with names like Dave, Scott, Ryan, Matt. Though I can’t remember their faces I can still see their punches and subtexts; the baseball caps obscuring their eyes. I wanted to be fucked and fucked back into my body when I lifted mine. Thinking of myself there, I remember what my father told me the night the power went out during a blizzard and we shivered in the dark. Don’t worry, tesoro, it’s all a movie. How the black, uncertain night became the film with a happy ending, the family’s triumph over snow driving against the window, the frozen pipes and the downdraft that smothered the fire, all the tropes of suburban danger. I think of my father in the backyard with a flashlight, pulling the tarp back from the woodpile — Dazed with cold, his hands exposed and the snow effacing his tracks. Brave and vulnerable as a girl watching herself undress.

|

43

A Necessary Fiction New York

By the end of your second winter, when everyone has slept with everyone; when everyone has overdosed, moved away, or just disappeared, you start to understand soap operas — the characters struggling prissily against consequence in baroque rooms where it is always between seasons — and you’re sure they’ll invent an illegitimate child or an Argentine heiress so the plot can spin on oblivious as an empty soup can down Lexington because nothing is as interesting as it used to be and it’s all faintly amusing and overdone; because at the end of this universal hour you’re sure you’ll rise and make dinner while the credits and the truncated scenes of some unfolding spectacle flicker on the screen.

44

|

He Was Only Half as Beautiful

on his back, but I liked him better like that because flaws are footholds and fucking felt like falling into the center of something soft and unnamable. I thought of the drag queen next door who painted on her eyebrows with black, tragic kohl as if every night she might meet Lorca in a bar thick with regret and red lampshades. There were dust balls big as tumbleweeds under the bed, but it didn’t matter. He had dark eyes. He believed in past lives. Tequila and worms for everyone. • • •

For a while there were pretty words and rose petals on every plate, fifty ways to say wind in a desert language, whole afternoons stuffed into the shadows of daydreams. Somewhere in the middle, we started to shower alone again and I noticed a hornet’s nest tucked into the lap of the brush, a hollowness behind the eyes unburying itself. Still, the thought of him in another country parking his car or ordering dinner pricked at me. • • •

|

45

I wanted him to know I loved him. I wanted it to be theatrical, so I held my hand like a lid over the flame of a candle. Smiled and said, It’s a sure thing, this burning. Then a man at the bar told me I looked like Ava Gardner. Though he was drunk, it felt good to be looked at, even a little bit. Should I say I wanted to be flattered and possessed, to lie naked in the cut grass, listening to a song about longing skip and skip and skip? • • •

Poor pigeons, fucking outside on the ledge, puffing their feathers as if it should mean something, the protracted boredom of couples figure skating. Like gods, the commentators argue and predict disasters. I start saying the wrong things just because they feel good. Silver spurs in the sides of night. Tell me this is childish. Tell me I shouldn’t want to ruin everything. Say we’ll fall asleep inside of our bodies and in the morning we’ll pull up the shades, and watch the sun ascend like a pale orange Cadillac.

46

|

California The sight of immediate reality has become a blue orchid in the land of technology. walter benjamin on cinema

Animus, my Jung-dressed diaspora, O faultline I cannot learn to love, I have driven your freeways like a prodigal daughter searching for her avatar, I have combed your taco shacks and rest stops for a place where I can stand barefoot on the asphalt and drink a warm soda while I think about fire and bougainvillea blossoms peeking through the barbed wire fences that surround the outdoor pools of chain hotels off Hwy 101, where algae and semen copulate in murky water. California, because you have no history I am thinking of you tonight, alone in an east coast city of rants and neuroses and esoteric real estate. If I were to tell you that my apartment building is renovated and pre-war, you would not be impressed and knowing this makes me feel superior; smug younger sister, who inherits the moon nightly without asking why?, who is beautiful and easily distracted by e-meters and tan lines.

|

47

Is it in spite of or because of the eminent danger of brownouts and mudslides, that you are smiling, California, and voting for movie stars? You make me want to believe in polyamory. You make me feel like a castaway on a golden beach where everyone swims right after eating. At this moment in Berkeley, college students are holding a tree-in for the women of Afghanistan who cannot wear two-piece bathing suits to the grocery store and knowing this is like the hot, holy pulse of shower water in the morning, the intimacy of knowing someone upstairs is flushing, alone in the privacy of their own private suffering. The sun is flat-lining on the horizon of Muir Beach tonight, where your state poet (that nervous, trust-funded Adonis) is writing about longing and the poverty of language. If he masturbates, I imagine it is by firelight and in time to “Für Elise,” while a votive candle struggles to stay afloat in a bowl of lavender-scented oil, like a blue orchid drifting, drowning on a Technicolor sea.

48

|

Sleeping with René Magritte Every single thing which we see conceals something else; we would dearly love to see what that which we can see is hiding from us. magritte

Because he was not you, he seemed amazed by my nakedness. Threw back his head and cried, Ooh-la-la! when my nightgown slid to the floor. Filled with the torrid air of his admiration, my breasts began to swell and expand — a performance for the source of their awakening — until my whole body grew cartoonish, statuesque, like Baudelaire’s giantess grafted with Betty Boop, like a device in love with its own detonation, I pitched a white flag and braced myself for the pleasure appetite takes in satiation. Ooh-la-la-la!

|

49

Afterwards, with his head on my American stomach and his hand wrapped around my right tit we’d stare into the doveshaped mirror on the ceiling while he chanted somewhere between laughter and tears, This is not a breast. This is not a breast. I admit I loved him like that, taut and urgent, famished and re-wired by repetition, the way he looked on the new moon, pacing the yard in a housecoat with a rifle under his arm and the whites of his eyes aglow, like a deranged Pepé Le Pew searching for a shit-perfumed girl. If it’s true that everything — cloud and curtain, motor and iron railing, even the mattress in the alley with busted springs — conceals something unknown and therefore perfect, then isn’t each discovery its own undoing? As in the night you tied my wrists to the bedposts with twine — my soft-core strain — my need, you said — urgent, naïve, to tear the skin’s seal, dislodge the deep image — a bowler hat or a birdcage embedded in the vein. 50

|

What you didn’t say: Disclosure is a double-bind. As in: You must love me. Still, you were mesmerized that bald second before the blood began — the raw skin — pale and organ pink, like two pearled secrets you said I could never keep. In the morning, the scabs burned like some outlaw underworld against the bone china and the Belgian waffles drowned in whipped butter. It stung in the shower when the soap dripped down my arm, stung when we stood on the roof watching the weather gather like the hem of a dress we trip over and back into ourselves.

|

51

Polarity

Dear Sir, You make betrayal seem easy. So it was, you said once and by way of demonstration, lifted the lid of your pocket compass and waited for the frictionless bearing to find its direction. But, what to say about inertia tonight, when the house is dark, there are fruit flies in the sink and through the window, I am watching the miles we biked through third world countries, where bandits and a limited knowledge of the language were props in our drama: you, always on the verge of some conversion, like a dog with its head flung out the window on the freeway; me, always asking for directions, shredding a red napkin on the Malecón in Puerto Vallarta. One moment, I’m water from the deepest oasis in your canteen; the next, I’m warm champagne slurped through a straw somewhere south of Palm Springs, where you are building a trebuchet to smash a luxury car on primetime air space,

52

|

because you wanted adventure, and didn’t I give you suicide pacts and war games, rough sex in airplanes, hummingbirds palpitating in the trees? You said, is that all, darling? These are the stories we invent when the North Star turns out to be a Cold War satellite. So, tell me this is rapture — the mind’s needle swinging towards the next summit. Tell me, dear Sir, because the compass needle is shot and it’s raining here. Please send a body bag. Sleepless tonight, I feel the magnet behind my eyes, my mind tugging toward the pole of you. Like the tongue that tests the metal bar of a meat freezer, I am learning the taste of my own blood.

|

53

Strange Zippers |

A Poem in Which the Heroine _______ Ha più forte sapore la conquista violenta. scarpia in puccini ’ s

TO S C A

The Entered Apprentice There’s a woman next door who hates barking dogs and Castro more than you could love anyone. Sometimes, you sit on the stoop with her talking about the day’s disasters: the tram stranded over Roosevelt Island — school children and Diamond Row Hasids suspended in the air for seven hours while rescue helicopters circled like a fugue that explains the night: o dolci baci, o languide carezze. And if an aunt with black lungs has sent another box of Florida oranges, you might offer her one; talk a while longer about her ex-husband’s ridiculous sinverguenza and how it is that Russian women in Brighton Beach wear endangered fur when they can’t afford furniture. You’ll talk until a minor red sun sinks over Herald Square and you’re overwhelmed by a pelagic urge to be out anywhere, because New York is a night city, where desire slides its surgical hands right through your body until you are permeable, peeled open, living in the whole universe simultaneously.

54

|

• • •

The girl you meet on the F Train says bondage makes her feel safe, then please, because there is this memory of a car seat and a scar that stretched across her mother’s throat when she tightened the straps and the buckle’s click, like a familiar tongue — the sacrament of restraint that meant, You are loved. Seconds later and she’s spread out on her cold apartment floor and if you had any sense at all you’d be in the stairwell by now, but it’s midnight on the shortest day of the year and you think you might enjoy these dark games that lesser gods and trust fund artists play in their spare time, so up with the dust ruffle! And into the gilded box beneath the bed, where she stores all the instruments of a restless child’s cure . . . The Fellow Craft So it begins in winter, a period in which sex feels primal, as if breaking your body against anyone’s is essential to warmth, reminding you of a transsexual’s personal in the Voice last week: Forceful sex care provider. Fucking, really fucking one night after the bar, you feel in the friction a union with the energy outside — the contrapuntal notes of skin slapping skin, a communion with disaster. All this will pass, you tell yourself. You are young. There will be time for the boredom of T.V. and political discussions, nights when your flesh feels radiated, too clean of desire to care about the sacramental violence of freight elevators.

|

55

• • •

The man sitting at the bar of Drink Me on Sixth Street brushes back his Nazarene hair. My mother was Kerouac’s last lover, he says, My father painted until the gun went off. These details he hurls feel anecdotal and the girl behind the counter stirs contempt into his yerba mate. You don’t care. Scherza con i fanti e lascia stare i santi. He has the kind of stare that impregnates tables. So, let him. You don’t have to be immune, just furniture at this evening hour in January when the bike messengers ride down the middle of Clinton St. plunging hard and steady into their pedals, like samurai hell-bent on seppoku. Dismounting, they lock their bikes to the fence that reads no bikes; then order Brooklyn Lagers while the girl behind the counter smiles for once and puts on the Def Tones. • • •

There are still days when you can walk open-mouthed through the city, studying the monochrome delis on Second Avenue — o recondita armonia, afternoons when the shards of conversations overheard (I waited in line so long I forgot what I wanted; I was kicked out of Barnes and Noble for moving the Bibles to the fiction section) explain your life. Nights when the heels you never wear for long are strewn across the right stranger’s floor. At the party, blowing lines in the bathroom with a girl from Malta, you notice how delicate her shoulder blades are, like a heron’s bones. Nodding off in the bathtub, someone’s 56

|

pantyhose slung over the towel rack — a run, a fleck of blood at the toe, a warm sluice in your throat, while outside the garbage men swing barrels like buccaneers and dawn begins a syndicated song that has nothing to do with you. • • •

She calls it a little game and you are accommodating, a pleaser, though you feel ridiculous strapping it on at first, but soon you are thrusting harder and you start to feel like an amputee reunited with an extremity. Sirens in another universe pulse across the windowpane. She thinks the gods are complicated mothers, she thinks so many things and you’ll never tell anyone you’d rather be fucked and left out on the fire escape in the rain than miss the afterparty. You hold your breath, bracing yourself against this assault you thought you could master because just once you want to be the one who gets to say, Places everyone, places. The death scene is about to begin. • • •

Here you are again, posing inside the grimy powerhouse of desire, in the roles of predator and prey. The tray of pills he offers you: Quaaludes? Barbiturates? Dangerously stacked books on the Mayan prophesies. The thing about hypoxyphilia, he says, is that someone might get killed, but it’s not personal.

|

57

You remember that the super’s pit bull finally mauled the Russian’s bichon frise last week on Eleventh Street and everyone watched as if it were Animal Planet. When the sex is over, you notice his part-time daughter’s toys in the bathtub, a deep crack running down the lion’s porcelain paw. Back on the street and the way it seems submerged sometimes, the seamy, swampy air of Sunday afternoons when you realize you have no idea where you’re walking and a voice you thought was gone begins like a quiet war drum: senti, l’ora è vicina. The Master Mason Only God can smell water, you are thinking, lost again in Times Square Station, the roof leaking, but you’ve never believed in God. Or maybe, He’s presently crammed into the front car of a commuter train bound for Hackensack. At least he’s going somewhere. For you, it’s not so easy. It’s rush hour and you can’t find the Uptown A. Conde Nast women glide by in control-top nylons, smoothing their stomachs, searching for flab above their waistbands. There are delays, but no one understands them. A man you’ve never seen before shoves the Book of Revelations into your palm, then he grabs you, kisses you hard. There is the smell, too intimate, of sweat on his upper lip, the decorum of ambush — the express train screaming by and it feels like surfacing; the world, the deafening world where the book falls and you see for the first time that the still center of the city is not a townhouse on Central Park West, but 58

|

the underpass between Port Authority and Times Square. He’s gone and there is the stamp of some tall, practical woman’s sole: Naturalizer bisecting the End of Days. For every departure there is the flickering of an arrivals board. For every haphazard prophesy there is the floor’s slick sheen of grime, a second skin brown as the mouths of rivers — Creole, mestizo. Lines blurred. There are wrecking crews on every corner. Somewhere, a woman who’s never taken the subway before is opening a Burberry umbrella in front of Barneys while her driver sighs and says, I’ll make a few circles, madame. She is the negation, a cancellation of every transfer you’ve ever made — the turnstile swinging like the doors of Darwin’s saloon, where the bodies of the unbrave cover the floor and you step over them, into that station called Violent Conquest, finding yourself finally at home.

|

59

The Fitting

A pause, a pang in the stomach. She thinks love is an airshow — all flybys and the vague threat of accidents, wind flattening the skin of her face. She does not say, I feel one-dimensional when you go. I leave the refrigerator door ajar and let the milk curdle. You’re on your back in a torn bathrobe, a boring girl, an organ donor, watching birds fly in and out of the airshaft, listening to their smug little songs while takeout menus wad up under the door. Desperation suits you. Are you ready for your fitting? Stand in your underwear in a drafty room and say, Please, I want it red and polyester, something that won’t breathe in midsummer. Fold your arms in the doorway and swear, This is the last time I cry today, for the fifth time. Believe it. Warm yourself against the things she said late at night, the way a cat finds the last square of winter sunlight. Remember how you waited until she lurched into sleep

60

|

to pull the cigarette, still smoldering, from her fingers. How watching it slide down the neck of an empty bottle made you feel ashamed and satisfied, like a friend’s three-year-old daughter who flushes washcloths down the toilet, and cries, All gone! Then, solemnly, Sorry. You do hard time on a park bench beside Larry and on good days, when he doesn’t have the dts, he composes an exquisite litany of all things he hates: Brownouts, MTA strikes, rich kids in leather bombers, women who want to understand me. Yes, you realize, there were a few pretty times. Watching clouds undress from the rooftop, licking sangria from the underside of her chin, but didn’t she mythologize herself in a crowded room, saying things like, My name means “the center of a flame” in a dead language? Wasn’t everyone fascinated? You are not so foolish anymore, having known her, all the smallest crimes she committed, like the time she called you a philistine for walking out on that Kurosawa film. Now, the brides in the dress shop look moronic sucking in their stomachs and gasping before the three-way mirror. It isn’t glamorous,

|

61

but you’re sure it’s safest to be the seamstress, the one who reads waistlines like verdicts, who gets to say, Hold still or I might prick you, the one who waits in the background, prodding a pincushion, pulling the measuring tape taut, like a whip. When you’re not sure, remember those strange, muffled sounds she made during sex, as if the coordinates for buried treasure were caught in her throat and she’d rather choke than share the gold.

62

|

On the Occasion of Our Argument During a vh1 Best Power Ballads Countdown

Even in this late hour of realism, splayed out on our cold pre-marital bed, I can read beneath the eyeliner and the whammy bars, everything I’ve learned to love in men, which is sloppy indifference and a vague threat of violence. You play the baseline for “Smoke On the Water” in the air while staring into the full-length mirror before turning to say, These guys could really play their instruments, with more conviction than you’ve said anything in months. You study the bassist of Deep Purple and say, Slash is derivative. All of these adolescent texts claim we’re on the highway to hell, so why not sit back, longing for simple times when a woman could appear in a video without the threat of a storyline? If this were 1987, I’d use my aerosol hairspray shamelessly and you would not count calories. Maybe what we need more than anything is to be fucked to sleep in a California king, or slapped across the face, then audited and cleared of our pain, which is the needle of a busted e-meter or an amplifier left out in the snow. So, if all of our synthetic pastimes and paid-for transgressions amount to more than broker’s fees and rug burn, then I’m sure a woman

|

63

covered in creamy car wash suds will meet us on the hood of a red Corvette at the end of the countdown and I promise, my love, that her pussy will be shaved.

64

|

Last Happiness

They’ve been flirting all night in Arabic, the man you might love and Miriam Ayoub, who plays the oud and speaks in a songvoice that coaxes a deep counterpoint from his throat. Sure, they stop sometimes, start to explain, but so much is untranslatable, so they say, and go on talking and laughing right across your body as if you were an effigy propped on the barstool of this onetime Chinatown brothel turned speakeasy, turned red-lampshade bar with water stains on the glasses. The tilt of his head, the protracted music of her laughter, the way the flame from a red candle pools at the surface of her skin like something by Matisse. All this means you are hopeless. You tie the ends of a cherry stem together over and over in your mouth. You have the deftest tongue in the city, but no one notices. Across the street, ex-cons unload produce from the back of a truck. You admire them, you want to sweat and strain until touch means work and empty hands are the night’s satisfactions. How many hands have held this glass? Turned too fast to watch a stranger in the doorway

|

65

and let a mai tai slosh over the lip? How many eyes have strained to read the names of drinks — Virgin’s Downfull. Suffering Bustard — misprinted on the menu? When he goes to the bathroom she calls you Habibti, which means my dear or you are a very pretty girl. Here, let me run my hand up your leg find that warm spot beneath your skirt, so that when he returns you will have some hidden pleasure while we go on and on, because every Arab knows conversation is an argument against death. The fact of her touch, the way she moves her hand, so slight and circular, not to bother the pattern of your skirt or the smell of rotting lychee drifting in on night air, makes you throw back your head and forget that this is New York City, where history wastes nothing and the massage parlors flash Open All Night signs in bright, carnal letters as if pleasure were the one brief, brutal, impersonal thing in the world.

66

|

Notes

The book’s title, Taste of Cherry, is inspired by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 film of the same name. “La Bufera: Our Last Trip to Sicily” refers to Montale’s La Bufera e altro (1956). “La Bufera,” the collection’s title poem, means “tempest” or “strong storm” and is a reference to Dante’s Canto V, which tells the story of the ill-fated lovers Paolo and Francesca. The epigraph is from the poem “Il Torre” and uses Charles Wright’s translation in The Storm and Other Poems. The epigraph of “Notes for a Novice Flâneur” is from Walter Benjamin’s Charles Baudelaire (Trans. H. Zohn). “Carnivale, 1934” is inspired by the short-lived hbo series Carnivale (2003–5) and by Richard Siken’s poem “Scheherazade.” “Epic Poem Concerning the Poet’s Coming of Age as Attis” refers to the Greek myth of the goddess Cybele. According to Ovid’s version of the myth, Cybele, Attis’s mother and lover, drove him to madness and self-castration: “Ah, perish the parts that were my ruin” (Ovid, Fasti 4.240). The title of section 8, “Hush, Can You Hear the Cries Beating Against the Window of the Wedding?” is inspired by a line from Lorca’s poem “Blind Panorama of New York” (Trans. C. Maurer). The title of section 10, “In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni,” is based on Guy Debord’s last film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), which is a Latin palindrome meaning “we enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire.” “Gilead Red” is written in the voice of the anonymous main character of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Hand Maid’s Tale (1985). The poem contains passages from the novel. The epigraph of “Girl in the Grass” is from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). The first three sections of the poem are written in the voice of

|

67

Caddy Compson, who is exiled by her family for bearing an illegitimate child. The last two sections are written in the voice of Caddy’s illegitimate daughter, Miss Quentin, as a teenager living in her mother’s childhood home with her ailing grandmother and sadistic uncle. The poem contains passages from Faulkner’s novel. The epigraph of “California” is from Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Trans. H. Arendt). The epigraph of “Sleeping with René Magritte” is a quote from René Magritte, as cited in his biography, Magritte, by Marcel Paquet. In “Strange Zippers: A Poem in Which the Heroine _______,” all of the italicized passages in Italian are from Puccini’s opera Tosca. The epigraph, “Ha più forte sapore la conquista violenta,” means “the violent conquest has a strong flavor.” The italicized titles of the poem’s subsections refer to the three degrees of Freemasonry: the Entered Apprentice, symbolic of birth and purification; the Fellow Craft, symbolic of the learning years and early manhood; and the Master Mason, which signifies death, resurrection, and reincarnation through which the subject gains access to secret, divine knowledge. The poem’s subject is inspired by life in New York City and by Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America (1990).

68

|

In the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry series Cortney Davis, Leopold’s Maneuvers Rynn Williams, Adonis Garage Kathleen Flenniken, Famous Paul Guest, Notes for My Body Double Mari L’Esperance, The Darkened Temple Kara Candito, Taste of Cherry To order or obtain more information on these or other University of Nebraska Press titles, visit www.nebraskapress.unl.edu.