The Best American Poetry 2012 (20 page)

His behavior was affecting her marriage.

She chose never to introduce her children to Durell.

Perhaps he had a mental illness, perhaps he invented—

perhaps, perhaps, perhaps—

but no, she pressed on, perhaps it
was
his sexuality, he was
too
sensitive . . .

“People can be cruel,” she said.

She felt he had never adjusted to cruelty

as if cruelty was something that one needed to adjust to.

Later, he was picked up for charges of soliciting sex.

And the more she told me, the less I knew.

All about us, a stillness began to displace the light

and Durell was there, and no longer there, staining that stillness.

After an estrangement ends there comes a great stillness,

the greater the estrangement the greater the stillness.

Across the parking lot, a gate rattled.

I told her he often said his life had been a failure,

I tried to convince him otherwise, but he never believed me.

Half a century ago, she broke off contact.

Her protracted estrangement made her look ill.

“Please, please,” she said.

Her voice trailed off,

although what she was pleading for was not clear.

No, no, she did not want her grandchildren to know.

Subtle variations of Florida evening light withdrew with finality.

The pool brightened with moonlight, the color of snow.

The pool was still.

Darkness spilled everywhere.

There we were,

a man and a woman sitting in cushioned lounge chairs,

as if the world would always be an endless pair of separated things.

We did not touch each other.

We were still a long time.

from
Poetry

PAISLEY REKDAL

Wax

Family portrait with French Revolution and cancer

Tussaud is said to have knelt herself at the cooling bath

to mold him: Marat, “just after he had been killed

by Charlotte Corday. He was still warm, and his bleeding body

and the cadaverous aspect of his features presented a picture

replete with horror.”

Now, the dripping head remains exactly

as it once looked, according to the placards, and to which

the famous painting can attest,

though what one says and what is history

are each rarely certain: here are only fragments

of what is left: the white sheet swaddling

the head, white body and bath, lank arm splayed

and the pallid face with its Egyptian cheekbones—

In the painting,

death comes in the form of a slight slit

delicately emblazoned on the right

pectoral: how tiny must have been that organ

for such a small wound to finish him. Not

like this wax man's heart, which must be large,

dangerous, intractable, worse than yours as the knife's great size

and placement indicate. Death

is not a small thing here. It takes work

to make it exact. It takes diligence.

Look,
the doctors said,

as they took us in the room.
The new cells with the old ones.

And they held the little chart up to the light.

*

Hands snatching in the plaster, the eye

sockets, lip cleft: all Tussaud could take back to reconstruct

cire perdue
's inverse procedures: to coat the wax

on plaster instead, favor the viscous

over molten metals; Tussaud's uncle, Curtius, taught her,

taking out the little calipers and stylus, looking

at the body and only seeing it, stopping thought

in order to make it spectacle. “Curtius

has models of kings, great writers, beautiful women,”

noted Mercier. “One sees the royal family

seated at his artificial banquet—The crier calls from the door:

Come in, gentlemen, come see the grand banquet; come in,
c'est tout

comme à Versailles!
”

Come and look. The king

is seated by the emperor. He is just your size

though his clothes are finer, and now you see the long face

is less attractive than imagined, the crab-like hand curls

over plated fork and knife: you are so close, you can walk beside him,

pointing out the little similarities, the curved

and moistened lip, mild smile, fat pads

of the cheeks: all of it so close it hurts the eyes to pinpoint

just where the light is coming from, to give it shape,

distance by giving it a perspective altogether

different from yourself.
List all the family members

with a history of this condition.
Today,

*

on the first floor of Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum

you can find celebrities and sports stars, every politician of note

though you will not see these same figures five years in a row:

there is a death even for the deathless, objects

that depend on reputation to survive,

while the bodies in the chambered basement fever

in their blood-stained gowns. They can live forever

inside our terror, as in Florence, where once they sculpted

skeletoned ex-votos out of wax, oil-stained skins

appearing to stretch even as they stayed frozen, recalling Dante's belief

that the medium's malleability would retain whatever power

could be impressed upon it: a face, a ring, a life force.

It was a plague year. Churches

were filled with offerings: friezes of figures

writhing with disease, infants staked

in their parents' grips. The wax gives each body

illness' vivid texture, yellow skin, purple skin, skin that blackens

at the joints, all the colors corruption takes

as the bodies too collapse themselves to shelves

on shelves of flesh: the family become a single,

swarming mass of misery, as each ex-voto was itself

a prayer but altogether became a panic:

Take this shape, take this

body that is better than myself, that can be

burned down, melted, added to, can accrue

new filigree and detail: this one will survive

where the other won't.
Look: the wax

shares our secrets of birth and age, but unlike us keeps renewal

stored inside the cells.

The doctors

took out their pens. They wrote down all the family

members with this condition: grandmother, grandfather,

aunt, uncle, father, mother, who

was it among us who hadn't been touched? There

the ring of candles smoking gold beside the casket.

And so we looked and looked, the mother's

father's face frozen in repose—

You have to look,
the doctors said. And turned

*

the human into map, drew bodies that could be

chart and information traced through centuries of experiment.

How many bodies to make the one body, endow the corpse

with attributes of life?

To keep it mute, intemporal—

And so the medieval

manuscript's
écorchés
playing the lute, riding horses,

striding their bloodless legs into town. Here

one skeleton tilts a skull in his palm, his own bone face tilted toward us:

Genius lives on

while all else is material
scrolled atop the vellum in its little,

withering snicker: it is all material here: all

answer and answer for the doctors,

and when the manuscript wasn't enough they scraped

the hive's glass scales with a knife.

They pounded and shaped, they took skulls

and poured on paraffin for skin

to give the blank bone personality again.

The wax could go where the mind was stuck.

It abandoned the map.

You're

a visual person,
the doctors said.
Imagine this,

and pointed to a color, a stain, an opening.

I'd needed more and so they gave me more. They made

an anatomy of me.

*

In the museum, families want to take their pictures

with the murderers. They pace

the chamber's cavern to stare into black pockets

of shock, cave after cave:

it was Tussaud who thought to bring in the death,

though hadn't it always been here?

Here is the killer with his handsome face.

Here is Manson, Bundy, Hitler,

the Terror's row of heads still spiked on stakes:

you can see into the cavern

of the jaw, and what is that feeling

its way out through the neckhole, these dead

of the dead, these never-dead,

where to look disperses what we think we see

the second it enters us?

The world is all brain, and does it matter that the thing before us

is a replication?

Even the wax only holds its breath—

And here is pancreas and breast, ovary, uterus, veins

that spangle fragmentary ropes, a negative

of this view outside my window where snow

on the hills creeps downward, turns fall trees in their fog beauty

necrotic, ghost.

The code, simply, degenerates. On a table,

*

the head of Robespierre, Fouquier de Tinville.

They are here still, some personality crawls

like an animal into its tiny hole, fits itself there, invites us in,

then repels us: back, back: we are the kings here still and you

cannot join us, and when they marched the busts of the ministers

from Curtius's house (“They demanded,” he wrote Tussaud, “insistently

the citizens”), the busts were burned, were violently attacked.

The real has no limits, and still, is full of limit.

We think the heart matters. We think the breath,

too, and they do, that is what the wax says, and then

denies it: you are a king, too, and if you have loved him so long

by his symbol, here is something more exact.

Otherwise, why keep a real

guillotine crouched in the corner, why real

period clothes, real blood-stained shoes, no glass

so that when you go to the bathroom later

you are surprised to see the face in the mirror

twist into its expressions?

And the long corridors opened, and the doctors moved their hands

across my mother's breasts, her hips, they marked on charts the places

that were familiar. We used to joke

about the pesticides her father used, little silver canister swinging

at his hip. You could hear how close he was

in the garden by that panicked clatter, the stupid

immigrant. The tomatoes were silver after he'd finished.

And the radiation after X's polio. And the pills

the doctors pushed for Y. And the chemicals with which they infused

our napkins, our pencils, our mattresses, our milk—

*

Look how the wax imbibes our novelty and richness.

It takes on some of our power as well, the blood paint

of the Christ statue seeming

to run, to swell. For centuries they argued

how to divide him, man or God, till Calenzuoli shaped

a wax man's head then split the face

to find it: scalp flayed over the intact portion of his crown, flesh halo

where the passive gray eyes flicker and the stripped muscles gleam.

What is man is all red and red, tendon, cartilage

glimmering with a sheen of beef fat,

while the rest is the expression

of a patience endured through pain: our image

of the image of Christ, the exactness

of his interiority, the wet formulations of the mind.

“Eye, nose, lip / the tricks