Cover

Some things move in and dig down

whether you want them to or not.

Like pieces of small glass your body subsumes when you are young . . .

— CHARLES WRIGHT

Unearthly Delights

After you rip through the screen

and wedge yourself into Father’s bedroom,

you find a pile of art supply catalogs,

brown scraps of bedspread,

cotton batting, a rodent body, rodent turds,

and tiny white naked human creatures

flipped topsy-turvy to skewer

down the ass and out the mouth

in the primordial ooze that is manifestly

the brimstone and bile of this book left open

to Bosch’s realm beneath the left hand of God,

my foxed legacy of human bonfire.

•••

Object Lessons

From Chevalier Quixote Jackson

What might happen to the collection if we let narrative and desire back in?

MARY CAPPELLO

To answer a wish to possess:

tuck a chess piece into a cheek.

To meet a hunger not to share:

swallow a kewpie doll whole.

To recall the rubber of a nipple:

suck on a pencil eraser.

Safe-keep sincere assemblage

by stowing in a ribcage. Yes,

now I lay my

two pressed pennies

down to constant tissue.

•

Like Dr. Chevalier Quixote Jackson,

nineteenth-century laryngologist who

removed from tiny upper bodies

an involved collection of objects

—nails and bolts, radiator key,

a child’s perfect attendance pin,

a Carry-Me-For-Luck medallion—

to lay into trays of cotton, yes,

like him, each child had hoarded some thing

in her inmost chest.

•

Yes, because children crawl on the treacherous floor,

Chevalier, if I may,

removed then preserved every last one

along with stunning x-rays of needles

lodged in a small patient’s lung. Also

a charm in the shape of a hound. Perhaps

the hound who rescued him in childhood.

Perhaps a jar of charms that won’t leave go one’s origin.

(Perhaps my pooch who calms my errant heartbeats down.)

•

Origins: crime or act of preservation:

Saturn devoured his children

to save his own skin from divine betrayal.

Snow White’s stepmother devoured

the girl’s lung and liver—or so she believed.

My youngest, after Mother died, figured,

Grandma now lives inside my tummy

with dog and bird and fishy.

•

According to one biographer: at one point other children blindfolded Jackson and threw him into a coal pit, and he was rescued only after some mutt happened to find him unconscious.

•

In my cigar box, a swallow

nest of pine

lined with feathers, bits of birch bark, and trash

for comfort can coincide with comforting;

from the shred of blankie inside her purse to

his rabbit-foot keychain

to the hair she plucks and swallows

in a cycle of self-harm called Rapunzel.

Chevalier archived them in shallow drawers

according to their kind.

•

The two girls could not unlock the door to their father’s home. The girls could not open a window for the medical books leaning against the panes. The girls could neither pry open the bathroom window painted shut nor the cellar door where the carton of bleach and cans of stew were stacked against it. They could not find a ladder to climb to the bedroom window and check on a mahogany bedroom set—this, they knew to be surrounded by trash bags of mother’s clothing that they’d tagged years ago for the Salvation Army. And, hopefully, on the nightstand, there was still a collection of ivory netsuke.

Also, a reclining ivory nude, female, used by nineteenth-century doctors.

The girls wondered what he made of that woman.

•

The doctor’s x-rays captured

miniature binoculars, silver horse-charm, four open safety pins

lodged between tiny ribs.

Each feels like a story’s climax

when the heroine, dropping into a cave,

discovers a treasure at bottom

that cannot be removed unless she answers these three questions:

What is the opposite of “cleave”?

Who savors rampion?

Why not rock an empty chair?

•

How to extract an open safety pin without scarring?

How to save the object without anesthesia?

How to preserve all two thousand foreign bodies?

•

A child crawls on the treacherous floor

appraising every object inside her mouth.

•

Dr. Jackson produced the modern endoscope with the use of hollow tubes and illumination. To see inside. As if he could see the image of the horse-beating that had taken residence inside him like a primal scene, told him where his body began and ended . . .

•

In the Emergency Room, surgeons also remove sex-related objects

from the rectum (the ubiquitous light bulb or hamster)

and from the perineum (straight pins and nails)

and from the penis (rose stem with thorns).

There’s also the stripper flashing a razor in and out of her labia.

Alas, my imagination pales—

•

Newly coined terms—

Amylophagia, ingesting laundry starch

Cautopyreiophagia, ingesting burnt matches

Geomelophagia, raw potatoes

—all exemplifying specialized terms

within Pica, a disorder named after the Eurasian magpie pica pica,

known for its morbid craving.

(What does one turn to

when laundry starch, say, becomes no more—?)

•

Flashlight, trombone cleaner,

curling iron, screw, battery: all up the bum!

•

In the local Savings & Trust I descend to the corridor below street level. A woman sits in a cool gray light updating client info, filing her nails, text messaging. I step up to the bulletproof window, slip my ID into the slot, smile, and wait. She looks from my photo to my face. “Which one?” she asks. “The smaller one,” I reply. I am not able to say my ex-husband’s name in this ceremony of twenty years. “Yes,” she replies. And as she takes her key and mine, I think about this box as incomplete transaction: old wedding bands, diamond earrings twice worn, and Mother’s jewelry—inherited and rarely worn. No—never worn. Safe keep. Kept here. From myself.

Then there are bonds for the children. (I haven’t ever checked the other one containing the deed with the new husband.)

•

What is down the hatch?

(A penny-sized harmonica, a pea-sized magnet, button batteries, jacks!)

What then is the fourth question?

(What does that mean, safe?)

To whom does the extracted foreign body belong?

(If you tuck a crucifix under your tongue, Mama then can’t hunt it down.)

Too hard to swallow? Or, swallow hard?

(Nicole’s missing charms: sewing machine, thimble, Mother)

•

The why:

playing around wicker chair

playing with a tin cup containing a white pearl button

alone on floor with lucky-shell bracelet

put toy in his mouth to hide from sister

child alone in room found hairpin under pillow

bored or unhappy

•

Dr. Jackson’s Aphorisms:

Let your left hand know what your right hand does and how to do it.

Let your mistakes worry you enough to prevent repetition.

Nature helps, but she is no more interested in the survival of your patient

than in the survival of the attacking pathogenic bacteria.

•

Yes, how to extract a barrette without further scarring?

How to store the object of your ardor, even to stay what harms

(junk drawer, purse, . . . flash drive)?

Yes, how to persevere

long enough to sound an alarm? to be alarming?

•

Somewhere I have a palm-sized clock,

green with a cartoon face,

that Daddy bought for me at the hospital

when we visited Mother, who’d just had a baby.

And could that toy

be tucked away with puka-shells, miniature sleigh, and

—and really, has the point of an object lesson come down to this—

Mother’s plastic collar stay?

•••

A Dusting

However Mother has reappeared

—say, as motes on a feather duster—

scientists say the galaxy

was thus created. This daybreak

she seeds a cumulous cloud.

•

Wherever Mother is bound

she’s joined ashes ashes

or dirt underfoot or bits

off Tower North and Tower South.

Repurpose does not arrive whole cloth.

•

From stardust, dust bunnies,

Dust Bowl and Dust unto Dust

to Ruykeyser’s silica, Whitman’s boot-soles

and Dunbar’s What of his love, what of his lust?

to the samples that astronomers collect—

dust is where the sparrow bathes herself.

•

“Not a cloud in the sky,”

Mother says as she hangs the laundry outside,

Father paints en plein air,

and we girls sweep crumbs under the rug.

This summer, Father sees

Inferno everywhere.

•

No dustups from little girls!

As a consequence, one scribbled

on the dust-bins of history

and the other dusted

for fingerprints. And the mother?

The mother lived in a vacuum.

•

Inside the senseless corridors

the daughter cannot respire.

Inside the vulgar cosmic

the mother cannot be revived

in streaming wet traffic.

•

Nowadays, I lie down in the sunlight

to see my mama

moting around as sympathetic ash.

Yes, one morning whether misty or yellow

I’ll be soot with her—

elegiac and original.

•••

The Old House Speaks

Before I became foundation, I was a chicken-coop aways from farmhouse, carriage house and barn. And around my grounds, someone’s daughter played with her bisque baby. Among stink and chicken feathers. Eggshells. Nests.

I tasted the haze of dandruff and chicken shit. The taste of my own throat.

From my planks and wire I heard the clucks. The coos. The tap-tap tap-tap as the scabby rooster pecked like the son’s paddle-toy.

I wasn’t so much humble as meager. There is nowhere for anywhere except a runaway who kneads the dank, brown, soiled straw.

The farmer’s little girl played with chipped teacups alongside the buzzing kitchen scraps. All converted, finally, into a trash heap.

•

Noisy and noisome. From that rough roost to an indoor-out: branch and ice rip me open. Birds tear into my screens, leave droppings all over my insides.

Did I say a runaway? More recently, down the hill in one family’s garage, the wife turned the car on and fell asleep to the smell of gas—shutting the door to other neighbor’s rat-a-tat-tat.

•

The male raccoon leaves shitty paw prints on the grocery circulars and coupons that flood the floorboards. Even on watercolors left out on a desk. There is nowhere where there is no scat.

After winter torpor, I wince when the raccoon births her kits in a closet.

Some say a raccoon makes over two hundred sounds—and it’s true, I’ve counted as many.

And the mask, reduces glare at night.

And the ringed tail, stores fat for the winter and aids in any balancing act.

And the dousing of food, yes, “wash.”

Funny how the pregnant female kicks out the male.

Yes, where creatures thrive, I cannot breathe—

•

What will become of my kitchen? The room where the now-middle-aged woman, when a toddler, sat in the bright porcelain sink for a sponge bath. One of the few events that she cares to recall while sifting through the rubbish, once her mother’s home, her father’s house. Or was it the inverse?

•••

charms i.

Mindful

Collect a sand dollar from dry sand

And not from silted shallows

While wet it’s very much alive

And will consign its sorrows

•••

Constant Objection

More often than not, a house fills up

with only stifled objections

to a dozen glue guns, a case of Brillo pads,

jars of preserves. But—coffee cans

of chewed up chewing gum

is why he resided alone.

•

Notice that the simplest often yields the most:

OBJECT: body, doodad, meaning, purpose,

hope, butt, . . . to mind and to resist.

The theory itself yields: Pinky-Bear,

Blankie, Sock-Puppet, Nightmare.

•

Objection? Outside a neighboring clinic

three fundamentalists wait

to shoot the doctor at point-blank range.

Meantime, Father saw Medusa

on the clothes line, under the sink,

in a tureen of string beans.

•

He drew the mythic ball of live hair

that no one can stand or he’ll turn to stone.

Then there’s cherry-red on her toes.

Then there’s his own weekend Father

taking him to see “Boxing Kangaroos”

who turned out to be yawning strippers.

•

On objectification, Marx wrote:

As values, all commodities are only

definite masses of congealed labour time.

Yes, Hamburger Helper, trombone, robot vacuum!

Yes, covert kiwi or flagrant heroin!

•

(As for the coffee can of chewed up chewing gum—

just a necrophile’s faithful rite

to resuscitate a strict mama,

viewed on the Discovery Channel.)

•

After tossing her clothes and cosmetics

I crisscrossed the city on a bus:

peering out at the concrete,

cherry blossoms fell in my hair

from no open window. They piped up,

How much more can a daughter object?

•

Before I swept every speck of you

from the rooms where Father would carry on—

if only I’d saved your brush

with a few strands of silver hair.

Mother, dear object of my despondence,

What more can a daughter bear?

•••

A Little Safe

In a toy safe, I locked

seven glass giraffes from Grandma

once displayed on her credenza.

After she lost her riddled lung,

the hospital lost all her remains.

Or so the story goes.

•

I treasure her charm,

a tiny box housing a dollar—

not that that would get me far in a pinch.

And, speaking of pinches, she said:

Don’t let a boy into your purse.

But, what does a mother rehearse?

•

On Wednesdays, half the fifth grade

left for Catechism Class, each

to learn to save my soul

as if the chest, a cathedral. When

a cousin stepped out on his wife,

I called his other woman a buttress

and added, You’d best send her flying.

•

What I locked in my school locker

besides pop quizzes marked C,

a velvet coat, and Tiger Beats:

a locket. From no one.

Like evidence in a cold case file

of thirteen hacked-up call girls.

•

If I could visit Antarctica

I’d visit a penguin papa on his long-winded stint

warming an egg on his feet. Still,

a girl should not show her pieds ever

when around her father.

•

Yes, even in unkind terrain

the girl felt okay on a trek with a coyote

until they reached the apathetic border

and her heart broke off

its eight years of beating. The same

for the boy in the trunk. For

the hundreds of babies in tents.

I find the stories are the faithful ones.

•

After Grandma lost her riddled lung,

the raccoon ransacked emergency

boxes of powdered milk in the pantry.

Cold cases of Squirt remained safe.

And the word, safety? Think rubbers. Think patrol.

Think Glock. Then think accidental discharge.

•

I found that in the Isua supracrustal belt,

flora was frozen for billions of years,

secure until discovery. Throughout his home

Father entrusted his critical papers

to those catacombs of no recollection.

•••

Hatchlings

Though tough to experiment

on a crocodile in the wild,

laboratory research has yielded

that prior to hatching,

a little one begins to coo.

Why?

To signal to the mama,

start digging?

To cue siblings to coo

for a synchronous emergence?

Or to practice wheedling

for pastime or coddle? Or

perhaps to rehearse the menace

that even a crocodile must acquire?

Maybe, though, cooing is fun. How

to research what transpires

in the head of a hatchling

before it’s hatched—

and why we need to know—

might well be an intimacy

not meant to be trespassed.

•••

The Ashes

The puppy snarfles to be let out

and I wake to radiator gurgling

then feet crunching the reticent snow.

Before I was born, Mother sewed her own suits.

What do her ashes know?

•

Father shoved snow off the supine roof.

Mother crafted Christmas ornaments:

glue and glitter and red balls.

No tinsel, no angels.

Her death started in the living room.

•

For bonsai, pliers the size of a nail clipper,

spools of wire, and a fist-sized rock.

One bore a petite pomegranate,

never to eat, not to touch.

Her death began with a baseball bat.

•

In the vineyard, he secured the strongest cane

from training stake to fruiting wire.

Pruning with handsaw and lopper.

He’d leave a spur for the next season.

He shoved her away with direct objects.

•

In a cold snap if one pipe freezes,

the rest may freeze as well.

Even before the puppy stirs.

Even before a baby sister arrived

in Mother’s arms in the misleading car.

•

After the war, after she met Father,

she smoked menthols but didn’t cha-cha anymore.

She’d light up and blow smoke

out the apoplectic window.

He found the ashes on the sill.

•

Fireflies winked for mates or prey

outside the savvy window of my own first home

where I sewed a dress too smart to wear.

On the stereo, a bluesman cried,

I need my ashes hauled!

•

I tucked away our baby’s pink layette

in circumspect mothballs

for a christening that never took place.

As well, a doll that Auntie crocheted.

More than anything, I love tidal pools.

•

I know her ashes are at Father’s,

lost in his charnel of junk mail.

He claims that thieves have stolen the box,

his knob cutter and root hook.

He says, ashes aren’t remains anyways.

•

Winter stripped everything to limb

and dejected nest. No angels, no crèche.

I don’t know whose recollections are suspect:

after leaving Maui, Mother learned to swim.

(She loved tidal pools more than anything.)

•

In my kitchen, logs blink in the fire—

through blinds, the wind blusters and

browbeaten trees creak in the orchard.

The rain pours then stops for sun. If

he lost Mother’s ashes what more could I stand?

•

Omusubi tastes best on black beaches.

Because Mother never learned to swim,

she watched her five brothers from a blanket.

On the intransigent subway, I can’t recall if I’ve passed

my station. Metal smells of being fertile again.

(His mother said her social station—)

•

Mother showed our little girl how to sift flour

and how to crank an egg beater.

After Father lost her,

he barred us from his rooms and from his yard

where at night, long red worms

slithered up from the ground.

•

Mother’s ashes know: before the puppy snarfles,

Father shoves snow off the supine roof;

for bonsai, use pliers the size of a nail clipper;

in the vineyard, the strongest canes;

in a cold snap, a hair dryer on frozen pipes;

fireflies winked for mates or prey outside

while I tucked away my baby’s pink layette.

Mother’s ashes know their box is in the living room

where she didn’t cha-cha anymore.

Where has winter stripped everything to the nest?

In my kitchen, the logs blink in the fire and I know

omusubi tastes best on a back shore. I know, too,

she doggedly showed granddaughters how to graft flowers.

•••

charms ii.

Sympathy

When you spy a horseshoe crab

Flipped over on the shore

Right it gently in the tide

And with your kin—a true rapport

•••

Sparkly Things

Ephemera, mouse droppings,

pillows torn to feathers:

Father stays to nest

while the magpie knows in its bones

a hollow for flight

and a collarbone fused for stability.

Her collarbone had shown off

pearls, lapis lazuli, the coral from Tibet.

The strands are buried here,

my mother, long gone. Here, too,

I flew down the stairs when I was a child.

He slipped a few steps

covered in ice and leaves. He hit his head.

He is not a bird.

•

Its collarbone was confused

with the one for wishes. I wish

he had not lost Mother

•

to that house where the calico

ate one of her own.

Do magpies commit such things?

Yes, and flip over dung

in search of beetles conjugating there,

a secret hoard kept in a cupboard. Funny—

now we know these crow-cousins

actually fear

sparkly things.

•

My two cousins flew to Mother’s funeral,

fogged with incense—

not as august as a magpie who discovers its dead

and summons the others to raucously convene

before flying off, done with their patter.

Also not like a magpie,

he doesn’t recognize himself in a mirror.

•••

The Cryptic Chamber

For authorities whose hopes

are shaped by mercenaries?

MARIANNE MOORE

The nautilus, altering little from its Cambrian form,

jubilantly paddles about

by drawing water with a siphon

in and out of her living chamber;

then jet-propelling, adjusting buoyancy, and diffusing salt,

she whirls along sand and rock. Unknowingly

my beloved gave me such a shell—

an endangered thing

as well as a house that holds a mother.

•

I love that this mollusk,

coupling, spawning just once a year,

and whose eggs take nearly as long to hatch—I

love that ancient Greeks named her nautilus

ναυτίλος ‘sailor’

believing she—or he—used two expanded arms as sails.

In my mind, crucifix or a child’s snow angel.

•

Since the opalescent inner shell

passes as pearl,

escalating its own slaughter,

my cabinet is no longer curious:

•

now, I’m satisfied with a hornet’s nest from the backyard,

snake skin found on a footpath,

coil of whelk cases from the local beach,

and, also from the beach, a stone in the shape of Jizo,

so like the statue we saw in Shibuya,

bobby pins clipped to its red bib.

a complex

“lustrous coil”

erects

buoyancy

•

Those logarithmic spirals, naturalists suggest,

echo the arms of hurricanes and distant galaxies,

taking fifteen years to mature, fixing

the prized creature to a marine list

of those soon eradicated or

left to natural history diorama,

art exhibit, jewelry box. I’ve already

spoken of my mother’s coral necklace,

inherited then stowed away

in my safe deposit box, away even from memory

until I turned in the key and there it was:

a whorl of sharp red beads

that fastened with what my father called sister-hooks.

(To the list of things soon to vanish

add coral and the Hawai‘ian language?)

a relatively large brain

like the hull of a submarine

can serve as a

parrot

•

a relatively large eye can

implode—like

home

•

After all, I believe Design is design.

Still, I can also believe that the order of the universe

—including the one in my hands,

a shell cast in calcium and, when swimming about,

whose eyes peer through tentacles—

is mathematically mysterious. But

I’m not so romantic that I can’t see

extinct as natural—

I know that but she’s lasted so long—

a living fossil

safe if it weren’t for designated squalor—

•

a dollar a shell to thwart misery, I get—

with baited depth

the

Landman

stunned perfect spirals

•

Cryptic

When seen from above, the shell is darker in color

and marked with irregular stripes,

which helps it blend into the dark water below.

The underside, almost completely white,

makes the animal indistinguishable

from the brighter waters near the surface.

This shell colouration keeps the animal cryptic.

cups and pitchers

begin a formal

horror show

•

the curved

arms of Florence turned

gold and rubies

into danger

•

I know I know—a dollar isn’t merely pedestrian.

I know that some sell the chambered nautilus for their living.

I know I’m guilty of such purchase

and do nothing to give away or give way

to the distraught

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