Читать книгу Dandarians - Lee Ann Roripaugh - Страница 15

TROMPE L’OEIL: THE ANNOTATED VERSION

Sun’s yolk a greasy sputter in morning’s blue Teflon.¹

Glare of birdsong a platinum grinding. Turning and turning and turning. Unstoppable tinfoil cranking. It yanks the leash. Arms pushed through the red velvet vest.² Time for the monkey—wild and ugly, as most frightened things are—to clap and clank its tinny impotent cymbals.

An agitation of rubbings: crickets and katydids nervously finger the horizon, flaking away the gilt edge from daybreak’s chipped rim.³

Silk moths cloister themselves in the secret creases of box elder, birch, and sugar maple.⁴ Tender mouths like busy spool looms drooling an obsessed thread from their spinnerets—entire miles of seracin and filament—to kimono the brazen nakedness of their ripening bodies, a profanity of fierce spiracles.

The day’s clotted knotwork divides and subdivides. Fetus with a tight red fist. Tangled skein of yarn, unraveling arteries, pulling and pulling. Rasp and scratched tug of red wool. (Red Heart yarn. Three-ply. Worsted.) Lost thread, dropped stitch, snipped. Insistent tick of knitting needles with their too-bright clicking and fretting and clicking.⁵

What gets buried.⁶ So many secretive tubers and roots, all simmering underground. They gestate, pulse, and bulge, almost radioactive in their insistent tumescence—febrile root hairs whiplashing the homely earthworm-kissed faces of moles blindly tunneling by.

In this mute coolness, you wonder why you must always sequester yourself into the primitive fetal curl and whorl of the snail—why do you always gather yourself back up into yourself—when what you really want is to howl and screech and keen?⁷ To wail and shriek and scream? Long and loud. From treetops. Like peacocks.

1 There are, needless to say, regrets. It should have been whisked into a breathless froth. How else to scramble the losses? To caramelize the still-drunk sky?

2 Bind a frenzied monkey’s spirit with ropes and gags. Bring the switch into play to make it submit. After, offer candies, sweetmeats, nuts, caresses.

3 You turn off the phone, creep on all fours on the dining room floor so no one will know you are home. You creep on all fours on the dining room floor the same way a millipede once slid along your bathroom like a slim black iron filing smoothly pulled along from below by an invisible magnet. You wonder what unseen magnet pulls you along on all fours on the dining room floor so no one will know you are home. Your subject for the day, you say, will be trompe l’oeil: trick of the eye. Illusion. Delusion. Disillusion. Dissolution.

4 Once, you stayed awake all night, guarding a newly hatched cecropia while it painfully inflated crumpled tissue paper into gilded wings. At dawn, it flew. Tiny bright kite. A blue jay, too jaded to be fooled by decoy eyes, snatched it from the air and, in the nearby tree, tore away wings like plucking off artichoke leaves, then feasted on the striped creamy flesh of thorax and abdomen. Nevertheless, you will still lipstick red vigilant spies big as peacock-feather eyes onto your hands and feet and breasts and forehead.

5 Once, you watched an animal cruelty documentary. Yellow cat dunked in boiling water. Fur peeled away easy as slipping off the inner cellophane skin on a hard-boiled egg. Skinned cat still hissing and kicking. You didn’t want to look, but couldn’t make yourself stop. How can the eye paint a trompe l’oeil for things it’s unwilling to see? You know it’s possible. All those times you refused to believe what was seen through the lens of some prescient eye auguring how and when a love affair would turn to disaster well before the point of actual dissolution. Instead, the meat of that moment made sweeter by the cruelty of this knowledge. Like that time you were dizzied by windmills turning and turning and turning at the base of the Canadian Rockies. Too-beautiful thrust of mountain range into too-blue sky and the dazzled stretch of yellow canola flowers a too-pretty ruffling in the wind. But further up in the Crowsnest Pass, one side of Turtle Mountain gone avalanched down onto the coal-mining town of Frank in 1903. Frank Slide gone an underworld of rubble in the middle of the night. Yes. Like that.

6 You ask your ex-lover to blindfold you. You don’t want to be tempted into looking back. You say you are not prepared to sift through archaeologies of the underworld. Aperture is tricky, you say. Light is tricky. You want to skip the dismemberment, the postmortem, and go straight to the headless singing. You ask your ex-lover to blindfold you. And s/he does.

7 Beware of any headless singing. Headless singing is always a deception, a trick. An illusion. Delusion. Disillusion. Dissolution.