Imaginary Vessels

Paisley Rekdal

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Dedication

FOR MY FRIENDS

You think you do well to hide the little things in the big ones—but what if you were to hide the world in the world?

Chuang Tzu

We are truly ourselves only when we coincide with nothing, not even ourselves.

E.M. Cioran

I

Murano

MURANO

It is not miraculous. Only a handful of silica, fire,

and then the blower twirls another knob of gold

on his metal pontil, dipping the tip into a pot

inlaid with spikes to make the burning globe

twist in upon itself as the man breathes out

and a thin neck bulges, wreathes into a spiral

like a unicorn horn; but we’re bored, he’s

bored, blowing and blowing the same shape over.

It takes no effort. He stares off through one

of the factory windows as he does it, beneath a sign,

No Flash, a red line drawn through a cartoon camera

to indicate the work is private, dangerous.

The man’s tongs pinch out a chest, a neck, the crowd

applauding each development though it has seen

the same thing around the corner.

We know what will come next. The man

reaches into the bright elastic to yank

a fat neck forward, to pinch out hair, a shovel-

shaped face; to pull out one thin, bent leg

and then another, the glass itself now tinged with ash

as the fire runs out of it, dimming to topaz,

caramel. He splashes water on the irons

to make them smoke. It must be dangerous, this

material, or why else would we watch?

The blower has a bald patch, earrings, scars.

He dips his tongs once more into the figure

and out come back legs, a tail. The neck twists

and now the little face has a mouth that’s open,

screaming. Transparent hooves tear into the air.

The tail’s curled filament starts to thread

as the pontil pulls away. You want to say

“like taffy,” but don’t. It is not sweet.

Only a spark of heat and then the inevitable

descending numbness. Someone laughs.

Someone takes a photo. For a moment, the room

fills with light behind which we hear

the scissor’s dulling snap.

Our senses return stretched thinner, fine.

We can almost feel the shattering of the glass.

Bubbles

BUBBLES

The child purses his lips around a hole. Blows

and out the radiant world swells forth.

The park swings bend. His mother’s face shrinks

to the size of a bubble. I sit across from them,

on my separate bench, bobbing past in its reflection.

It’s my gift, this vial of soap.

I bow my dark head low as my friend’s son

pats my cheeks in thanks, obediently

sucks in another breath

and blows.

“Any fool can make soap;

it takes a clever man to sell it.”

So Thomas Barratt, 1880, said, and pursued Millais

to paint Pears’ advertising: an English painter

for an English soap. “Of two countries

with an equal weight of population,” he wrote,

“the most highly civilized will consume

the greatest weight of soap.” A quote

from my scholar friend in her book

on bubbles that she’s given me: my gift

of this toy a nod to her descriptions

of palm oils rendered in chains

of vats, thickened with the meat

of African coconuts.

Through a stream of bubbles,

I watch her wipe her son’s streaked face, recall

my washing machine at home which has a setting

labeled Baby Clothes. The store model

wore a pink-and-blue sign reading,

Don’t You Want One? I think

of the painting on her book’s cover, Newton’s

Discovery of the Refraction of Light: a thin-faced scientist slumped

in dark, while his nephew, by a bank of windows,

blows bubbles. On Newton’s side of the canvas:

a dusty globe, a world of shadows

that dissolves beside the child

in play, revealing how the sun refracts the panes

the maid will have to scrub. In the image,

she turns her head away, the sun

begun to bore into her eyes. And here’s a bore of sun

illuminating the bubble’s flaw that stuns the child

now blowing in the park, learning the tensile skins

can’t withstand the pressure

of a touch. “They don’t last!” he shrieks

as his mother hugs him, a squalling

aggregate of cells neither of us can hush. Of cells,

I also thought an aggravate. “Make this the sweetest

picture postcard yet,” Barratt begged Millais. And so

the painter drew a Pre-Raphaelite child at play

blinking at the globe he’s made, a lens of clean in which

the thin white etch of him sails past

in dark, the milk-white cheek, the booted

foot: the boy’s blue eyes turned in rapture to what

a parent’s invention makes. A Child’s World,

Millais titled it, but Barratt

stuck a bar of Pears in it and turned

the painting into posters, puzzles, postcards

shipped along with images of English flags

and Maori girls, kaleidoscopic

slow flash photos of bursting

bullets, their shock waves caught and used to improve

British rifle manufacturing.

“We have a perfect right

to take toys and make them into philosophy,”

my friend’s book quotes. “Inasmuch as we have turned

philosophy into toys.”

Look: a bubble of black

wobbles and bursts: explodes the world

to a slick of oil.

The clouds pull back. The boy, damp faced from his fit,

now sleeps. Sunlight holds, refracts him in his nap

as something in my friend’s face

cracks. It wildly opens.

Don’t you want one? something whispers. Don’t you, really?

Last night’s thinnest edge

of dream still wavers, the one where the doctor tells me

I am carrying, but will not tell me what

or when. Black hope rises,

bursts inside me. “It’s an aggravate of sells,” he says—

The world grows thin. My friend packs up the toys and kit,

tapping at her soapy vial.

She shakes up the foam and sticks in the pipe.

A world blows up.

The mother and child float by in it.

Vessels

VESSELS

Shouldn’t it ache, this slit

into the sweet

and salt mix of waters

composing the mussel,

its labial meats

winged open: yellow-

fleshed, black and gray

around the tough

adductor? It hurts

to imagine it, regardless

of the harvester’s

denials, swiveling

his knife to make

the incision: one

dull cyst nicked

from the oyster’s

mantle—its thread of red

gland no bigger

than a seed

of trout roe—pressed

inside this mussel’s

tendered flesh.

Both hosts eased

open with a knife

(as if anything

could be said to be eased

with a knife):

so that one pearl

after another can be

harvested, polished,

added to others

until a single rope is strung

on silk. Linked

by what you think

is pain. Nothing

could be so roughly

handled and yet feel

so little, your pity

turned into part of this

production: you

with your small,

four-chambered heart,

shyness, hungers, envy: what

in you could be so precious

you would cleave

another to keep it

close? Imagine

the weeks it takes to wind

nacre over the red

seed placed at another

heart’s mantle. The mussel

become what no one

wants to:

vessel, caisson, wounded

into making us

the thing we want

to call beautiful.

A Peacock in a Cage

A PEACOCK IN A CAGE

shaking out its corona of tail feathers is like light

glowing in a bulb, a man

dancing inside an elevator: the space

too small to quite contain him, yet

contain him it does; the way a cloud

keeps some portion of the sea inside it or a box

encloses air, encloses also

the philosophical cat both dead and alive

inside it. The way a car inhales the gas

containing bones of dissolved dinosaurs

and the cheese breeds mold to heal the cut that holds

the hurt cradled inside the body, the blood

thick with the trace of all things

we might yet express or become, such as

the mathlete or music lover, who holds first

one note and then the next inside her ear.

We try to pin the mind’s attention to the task at hand

though the mind can sometimes falter, the way

a tongue sometimes cannot rein in the word

whose meaning may escape it, may be captured

so perfectly within its syllables for once

the desire/the surprise/the distaste churn

palpably when uttered; just as the parent’s past churns

inside the child’s future or the identity of the stranger

hides inside the mundane title with which

we greet him. There are lies we clasp to ourselves

upon waking, truths with which we worry

ourselves to sleep, dreams memory struggles

to capture in the retelling: only the ends remain

in which the building crumbles back to dust

or the mother steps, naked, out of her unzipped skirt:

an image that bears the seed of future therapy.

One book contains at least a dozen others, the scarlet

bitterness of its pith conceals the sweetness

of the mangosteen and, when saddest, we suspect everyone

embraces someone else, though many don’t.

We think a woman shelters a house, husband and a child

inside her, that a man might accommodate

no one else. The party can hold its liquor

only so long, as we can maintain faith that requires us

to keep two contradictions alive at once, like day

and night tucked into the same sunset or the sudden

hatreds ignited by love: the patience

with which we hold still for the camera, believing

it will shore up time, and knowing it won’t.

At the Fishhouses

AT THE FISHHOUSES

And the black water under the boats with their pools

of bilge rainbowed out like rinds

of steak fat, the salt thick

in my nostrils, but pleasant, too: details

I still keep from Bishop’s poem, everything

else about it lost. At the docks,

I watched my friend slip

in her rubber boots; the wide, wet planks

glossy with mosses. You must walk

duck-footed to get to the boats, the black-and-orange

fishing barrels, the air with its tang

of rust and blood. There are always hooks

and anchors to be found here, nets and scrapings

of wood planed by chisel, the way

my great-grandmother was said

to have worked, employed as a shipwright

on the city’s waterways in the ’30s, according

to the newspaper clipping my grandmother

photocopied for me each Christmas.

The description of her gunmetal hair

and slim torso clad in overalls, the hands

she held out for the Times reporter

(“Callused,” he noted, “strong

as a man’s”), does not recall the woman

I remember for her farm in Bothell

before it became a Seattle suburb, helping me gather

raspberries from the long canes

she planted by her porch. We spent an afternoon

together sweating in the matching

long-sleeved checkered shirts she’d made us,

according to the photo

I no longer have, and cannot remember

whether is the source or confirmation

of this memory. Only the papery, gray-green

streaks of road dust on the canes, a bowl

of chipped porcelain inside of which

were raspberries. Very red, very sweet, furred

like my friend’s upper lip I remember

between my teeth as we stood

on the docks. The smell

of iron and winter mist, her mouth

like nothing I have tasted since.

When It Is Over, It Will Be Over

WHEN IT IS OVER, IT WILL BE OVER

pen and ink reproduction by Troy Passey of a line by

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Hurricane of what must be

only feeling, the painting’s

sentence circling to black

on blank, ever-

tightening spiral

of words collapsing

to their true gesture: meaning

what we read

when not reading,

as the canvas buckles

in the damp: freckled

like the someone

I once left sleeping

in a hotel room to swim

the coast’s cold shoals, fine veils

of sand kicked up by waves where

I found myself enclosed

in light: sudden: bright

tunnel of minnows

like scatterings of

diamond, seed pearl whorled

in the same

thoughtless thought

around me: one column of scale

turning at a moment’s decision,

a gesture I

was inside or out

of, not touching but

moving in

accord with them: they

would not wait for me, thickening

then breaking apart as I slid

inside, reading me

for threat or flight by the lift

of my arm, as all

they needed to know

of me was in the movement:

as all this sentence

breaks down to O’s and I’s,

the remnants of someone’s

desires or mine so that

no matter whether I return

to that cold coast, they will

never be there: the minnows

in their bright spiraling

first through sight, then

through memory,

the barest

shudderings of sense:

O and I

parting the mouth with a cry

that contains—

but doesn’t need—

any meaning.

Letter from the Pribilofs

LETTER FROM THE PRIBILOFS

Elizabeth Beaman to her sister,

Pribilof Islands, July 13, 1880

Blunt, bullying, this season’s bachelors climb

the rocks near Nah Speel, sleek backs blackening

the waters inside their seacatchy. The old

bulls line up in rows as at a burlesque

house, while their matkas roll in surf, thrash

upon the parade ground’s volcanic sands

turned glassy from the constant passing of seals.

One by one the bulls slip the line to claim

their females, each dragging his choice to a private

catch, as the bull gathers what he can,

the matka cuffed and bitten on the throat

if she struggles, the bull shaking her, banging

her down upon the rock until she rolls

her belly up, blank eyes wet in supplication.

This is how I imagine it. The event being

“no sight a lady should witness,” the Senior

Agent forbids me from the rookeries; John,

my husband now these thirteen months,

must privately describe it. Libby, he tells me,

you should see how soulful they are, it is

amazing to watch them weep. He takes joy

in their human qualities, recalls tales

of selkies who turned to seal-like girls

in surf, braiding their hair in seaweed plaits

to chain an errant sailor’s legs. And yet,

in seasons such as this he goes out with company

men to kill the mating seals in their rookeries,

drive them to ground with wooden clubs.

I’ve heard the sounds and smelled grease fires

smoking after skins are flensed, seen John

creep back from work, clothes spattered with blood.

How many months to be endured! And all before winter

comes, its long months unpunctuated by sun—

And yet I can’t complain, having begged John

to take me, a lone white woman at these edges

of the Pribilofs. Reluctant first, he is, I think,

now proud of me. Without a maid, John is the one

to tighten my stays, fetch me

paper, drawing pencils, tea. When he’s gone

I walk as far as the officers will let me,

to sketch a little of the matkas and their young.

Yesterday, a shape disturbed me

at the game: some wraith shadowing

Nah Speel’s rocks I noticed late, absorbed

by the sight of two bulls hissing and spitting

at each other, while a third made off

with the spoil they longed for: the matka

flattened on the glassy ground. Interesting,

isn’t it, Elizabeth? the wraith addressed me.

I looked. It was the Senior Agent—

He is, as I wrote before, the dark one

who follows me on my rounds, complaining

of my presence here. He charts my walks

around the island; once, in the mess hall

pinched my arm in passing, hissing, Selfish

to remain—

At home I raged at John,

who shook his head, but will say nothing.

How can it be selfish to claim my rights

beside the one I love? A loud groan, the sea’s

kaboom, and one of the bulls, his shoulder

pierced deeply, struggled off.

I watched his slow creep back into the sea,

his shape dissolving inside a curl of blood.

When I looked up, the Senior Agent was gone.

Tonight, I send along a sketch I’ve done

of a bull with his sleek matka, half-drawn,

only the heads and eyes completely finished, that

peculiar quality to their gaze I struggle

to capture: that clear, yet fathomless unblinking

from which occasionally come—to John’s

continued astonishment—real tears.

II. Go West

GO WEST

Diamond Lil is all mine. I’m she. She’s I. Like Hamlet, but funnier.

Mae West

[Her language] isn’t clever dirt, and it isn’t really at all shocking—but it’s the kind women want, apparently. Women are simple souls.

Jim Timony, Mae West’s

manager

You’re

YOU’RE

Your hands your lips your hair your magnificent effervescence—

Vague as fog and turnip-hipped, a creel of eels

that slithers in stains. Dirty slate, you’re

Diamond Lil. She’s you, you say. You’re her. She’s I. O

Mae, fifth grade, we dressed in feathers and our mothers’ slit

pink slips, dipped into your schema and your accent,

aspiring (like you) to be able to order coffee and have it

sound like filth. And yet aspired to whom? Amazing

all these films and each cow-eyed character the same:

Catherine the Great, Margie LeMont, Peaches O’Day. I

grant, I never saw a single goddess go but you

rewrote her into you. Each maid a moon

orbiting your Mae. And she the same star always winking,

flaring out rotational names: Cave Girl, Sis, Tira, Fifi—

What’re you doin’ honey, makin’ love or takin’ inventory?

Mae West: Advice

MAE WEST: ADVICE

Ban tobacco: do bacon abed,

be delectable, collectible, a decent debacle.

Décolleté don’t conceal; acne, do. Be bold

and be toned, an octane-blond coed.

Be colonel not cadet, concede nada to doc;

date a cad and canoodle, be éclat on a cot.

Don’t lean on a deacon, be a dolt, a clone:

don’t bet on an Eden, don’t loot, don’t loan—

Be belle and ball, too, a deb Coco-labeled;

be ocelot, be lancet, be candle and cabled.

Canceled? Debated? Booed at to boot?

Elect to be tall. Don’t tan. Eat local.

Be oded, caboodled, be beacon and lect.

Don’t be a noodle: be cool and collect.

Marriage

MARRIAGE

Any dame that knows the ropes won’t get tied up.

Mae knows wit’s a waste on those who think

a woman is a sink of mind. Smart dames

edit out the spouse: rather get sent to Sing Sing

than tied in knots. A dame should take her own name.

She did. Tho ain’t that name turned into sign, her shape a stage

that’s trope? Rigid iteration, she smirked the same

at eighty as nineteen: a drawling monster roped

to her own shade. She’s a playwright. She’s a genre. “A woman

among men,” is what Mae said. “I’m new.” Then wrote

The Drag. Mae, did you get our unsure titters at the end?

Did you get you turned to gag? Prostitution’s

a more honest gig, you wrote, of marriage and the page.

And now your theaters stand dark. You got it right, it seems.

Hamunaptra, Dirt-Lip, Wag: everyone hates an institution.

Censored

CENSORED

I always believed in censorship: I made a fortune out of it.

Dalí nails Miss Bawdy: cave of lip-shaped couch and starry

eyes, a room dilated to empty: velvet space

in which a lotta hussy nothin’ floats, so writes

Variety of vaudeville’s paints that obsidian a face

moon-pale, shuttered to history—

Mae sends her maid Bea west

to Harlem where she cannot travel

to procure her tunes (Piano man croons: “He may be your man

but he comes up to see me sometimes”; “That’ll do,” Bea says) while

on the boards Mae nips out bits

of bio (spouse and birthday both), turns her script to cryptic

lace as police haul her off

for indecency. (“My play?” she purrs. “Let’s call it

‘Coitus,’ shall we?”)

In the courts and on the boards, Mae sways

and shimmies. Bea, from her place

behind curtains, applauds

as Mae’s mouth spits out bursts

of Bessie Smith, Lady Day, Ma Rainey.

Mae loves Bea so much she writes her

into play (Diamond to Maid: “Lissen, shadow,

whad’re you doin’ here?”), laughs at the thought

only one letter between them separates.

Dalí’s canvas is a frame

within a frame, portrait of a face for which

the outline is enough. She’s a sofa now. An oriflamme. Her eye

discourses. Hey, what’s that dark that breaks

through yonder window?

Court: So did you ever see her navel?

Witness: No, but I did see somethin’ in her

middle travel east to west.

Freedom

FREEDOM

He’s the kind of man a woman would have to marry to get rid of.

Mae: once, a man wrestled me to ground, wrangled my hands in his

and, when I tried to knee him in the groin (missed),

yanked my legs from under so I wouldn’t run. He laughed

as I saw stars. I get it: freedom (for a woman) has

a tag on it: ya gotta have more strength at hand, ya gotta have

no fear of fists. Give a man a free hand, he’ll run it all over you.

Gag whose strut of which I’m envious; of you, who thrived

on hungers without risk. Should I praise or blame these plays

no girl’s reality might imitate? Not even yours, feinting

off a drunken Fields, Yale men aswarm upon your stage—

To slide on your armor means to fake

away what hurts. The one who, instead of kiss, would shove.

The one who, gently, strangled. Mae, we weren’t swift

enough to rid ourselves of them. We were never swift enough.

Go West