Calculations
Eurydice: Am I too heavy?
Orpheus: Oh, no! Just the right weight to keep down to earth. Until now I was too light. I floated. I bumped into furniture and people. My arms were stretched too wide. My fingers were losing their grip. . . . How funny it is, and how lightly experts make their calculations of weight! I’ve just realized I was short of exactly your weight to make me part of the atmosphere.
— Eurydice, Jean Anouilh
Your hand in mine or around
my waist steadied my feet, my balance equal
to the mass of your devotion. And your hands
were the perfect fit for my breasts. I thought
my breasts were shaped for you to hold.
Your chest was just broad enough
when your arms circled me and I just
short enough to lower my head to hear your heart.
Sometimes it raced and sometimes
It skipped. Your rhythm became my timepiece.
And you were just tall enough so I on tiptoes reached
your lips with my lips. The light in your eyes
first thing in the morning lighted my smile.
You called me Lady Sunshine and said our words
were feathers in your cap. Your voice to my voice --
how many nights --was the ratio of harmony.
We prized all our right proportions, hips, legs --
and exulting -- the wings of laughter, our magistery
for death. We were clever at calculating
impossible sums. Does Life add up? Are the Good
happier than the Bad are sad? Is Heaven nearer
than Hell is far? Is Chaos darker
than Cosmos light? Flying High, how big
is Joy? And is it more or less than Going Deep?
How much does Sorrow weigh in ashes after the fire,
in remains after the flood?
In the distance between Hello and Goodbye
when does Sweet turn Sour?
How many lovesick boys and girls does it take
to redeem the one-and-only Orpheus?
We were good at taking turns,
trading places, living like acrobats of the clock.
Like children of Chagall, we were fugitives from gravity.
We sported all over time.
Our bodies embracing, we shimmied up dawn and dusk,
made love at the top of six o’clock light and dark,
planted dreams along the strands of three and nine,
dared the slopes of five and seven, kicked up our heels
at high-falutin’ twelve o’clock noon. We lost
any sense of shadow. Still, measure for measure
along the way, we came down to earth under Saturn rising.
From every angle we turned awkward. Like comic toys
we broke under the cross of matter --
matter of fact., matter of course.
Now I keep counting days like a woman on the edge
of time, dreading the next false dawn.
And the sun can’t find me. My voice curdles
and my melodies sink. Now your glances strike me
like daggers of glass and you are heavy handed.
Your words are dry as numbers, strict as the formula for lead.
Now I know rock-hard reality outweighs even our reveries.
Dying
Dying, you talk about death, your words
intimate as sex. Visitors like me pussyfoot
around your disappearing act.
You call it your bearable
lightness of being. I fill the lily
silence with useless gifts
of news in Present Tense Impossible
for you. I say, Henry is writing a book,
Sandy.is traveling. My voice flinches, tongue turns mute.
I stumble on the calendar marked Future Cancelled.
I feel like Medusa’s child while you look
like a lithograph. When your eyes focus
on me I turn into tempura, a ghost
of days you have already buried.
Do I intrude on you and Death?
Death, in fact, upstages me
in your room, croons to you, perhaps,
smiles certainly. Perverse angel,
with its cool breath, sucking your marrow.
This scene reminds me three’s a crowd.
Your going raises mother and father
when they left. Father called me stranger
and talked to some unnamed presence
about people he knew before I was born.
When mother closed her eyes for good,
death crooked his finger. Her voice
was lost in tubes that kept her heart
flickering down a hole in time. . . .
Now already speaker for the dead,
you look through me as if I am the one
to die. I am fading while you rise up
again and again -- no trick of the camera --
but superimposed on yourself
to be born with the dead.
Breaking
Sell her jewelry.
Her son, she thinks, is a salesman.
Introduce her to her daughter who wants
the silver chains, the golden filigree.
Her neck, lovely as any Modigliani painted,
once was circled by birthday strands
of amethyst, coral for anniversary.
She jumbles them, twisting until they snap.
They caught her throwing lapis
to the birds, her hands and steps amiss
as scattered beads. She stares
at her rings with eyes
sometimes burning ruby fire,
sometimes lost in a diamond maze.
Memory slips through the cracks
they call her final days.
Her persistence of memory is a storm
of belongings she cannot save,
her longings absurb as the mismatched clothes
they will not let her wear. Now and then
a watery image settles into a familiar face,
She can only speak a smile but, no,
that dear face is foreign as the clock,
another unnatural language.
At first her answers to anything were flowers,
gaudy and rank where reality disappeared.
“Are you hungry, mother?”
“Iris. Phlox,” she’d say. “Pimpernel”
Her words turned obscure, grew into figments.
“Moonbells. Treetalk”
Then darkening, her voice clogged,
“Weeds, weeds everywhere!”
She screamed and that was all.
On the fringes of her wilderness
family raise their voices to reach her
several atmospheres away.
She is being subtracted.
She is small remainder.
Reflections in a Silver Eye
A wicked looking-glass at work
beckons me before I give it a second
glance. No one knows where
it came from. Small and square, it’s propped
on a shelf between records and books
where we stop for coffee. It makes me stop
and see myself in a wooden frame dark and scarred.
At first I thought it played off the window
where sun --morning sun with its brazen
knack for spotting flaws -- added its candor
to the image. No, it has something besides the glare
of day, something like malice concealed
between paint and silver surface.
What elements in the glass,
what properties of the metals not found
in the formula met in fire and poison
and cooled into this plate for serving up
souls? Yes, maybe a helping of arsenic
in the mixture explains the slant.
Or maybe all-fired Lucifer (with his finger
in this & that) stirred the solution
between reduction and conversion.
Not all mirrors, but some, this one, I know,
shows more than I want when I comb my hair.
It tells how the years have composed
my face. Sometimes the sight
makes me run away to music or love
or poems to erase this pout, revise that smile. . . .
Other days when wonders start
from the inside out, my look mirrors
the change. . . I would be caught in glass pure
as an infant’s eyes, reflection natural
as instinct, not party to the writing on the wall.
Tango Dream
Unless man is free inwardly, the dance will always be a cocktail.. . . I still would be willing to sell my soul to the devil for a nice Argentine to do the tango with.
Beatrice Wood (1893-1998), Mama of Dada
In the middle of the night the playboy pops
into my head. What a campy fellow! Old Guard
a la Latin America by way of a Hollywood ballroom.
Picture Zorro or, if you’re old enough,
the vamp Valentino. He claps his hands
to start the tempo. He snaps his fingers to dress me
in veils of melody, harmonies unlocking
my heart without giving it away.
We’re under an unsavory sky, a ghostly brew
like frozen fire. He owns that sky.
Outcast he owns himself. He owns this hour,
unpredictable and fabulous.
Not everything in the dream is strange
and puzzling. We dance in my own backyard,
double lot big enough to embrace our embrace
and wide enough for our promenade -- stride
stride stride -- then pivot and turn. With every turn
my partner changes faces -- mask under mask
under mask. Fresh from The Book of Weird!
And each new face turns up his spirit.
I play along. Machismo in his staccato steps,
exhilaration in mine. Yearning in my eyes, audacity
in his. And the energy that drums below
the waist is the cure for common gravity.
The music is inside my skull and everywhere.
Around the trees rhythms of guitar and clarinet
and drums. In the open spaces the metal sting
of the bandoneon. My partner owns this air.
It surrounds us profane and forbidden.
Raw if not romantic.
Like his voice all insolence, city heat, city sex.
Contracheck is more than a move; it’s his attitude.
He tells me, “This tango guards, as does all
the really real, a secret.”* Not original *Jorge Luis Borges
but true. He says, “We have opened our lives
in the open air. I’ll come back.
In the meantime,” with a smirk on his latest face,
“let the sun peep inside your house at your solo
frenzy to radio music. Music how many times
removed -- mazurka and funny jigs and fandango.
I’ll come back in your sleep. And teach you different
moves -- feather steps and whisks and scattered sashays.”
© Lahna Diskin, all rights reserved
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