Pushcart-nominated and just right to address post-holiday melancholia …
“each one a little note
of longing, a little signification, incomplete
& therefore impermanent …”
Presenting an outstanding poem from our summer 2018 “Small Things, Partial Cures” issue. You can enjoy Amy’s litany as a broadside by dragging it to your desktop, or simply scroll down to read it in plain text.
Litany of Missing Earrings
Sterling bud & dripping seed pearls & lavender
under an oculus & Bakelite
& rhinestone & verte chinoiserie littering
my vanity ask for a poem
useless now for anything
besides translation, for the lingua franca
of jewelry: tiger’s eye, turquoise, lace filigree,
earrings whose spouses refuse
to be found, each one a little note
of longing, a little signification, incomplete
& therefore impermanent — but I don’t want
to catalogue decay
when what I meant is a glutton’s hymn,
a hedonist’s reliquary, my life’s
earrings strung like votive from the linden trees —
like this miniature
Venus of Willendorf, clustered breasts & thighs
that droop like foxglove. Or this —
a topaz stud, the orphan of a gift
for my eighteenth birthday.
How language & jewelry delight
& indict me — I who would write
with an eye loupe’s lavish specificity:
think the prosthetist’s brush
as it replicates the cuticle’s white crescent,
or the glass eye’s aureole
of hazel in green, in a scale so compressed
still-life, self-portrait, & abstraction meet.
How Whistler painted sex as a white collage
in his Symphony, his mistress Joanna posed
in a long, lace dress, fabric cloistered
around her necks & wrists, more virginal
than a bridal gown, as though for a Confirmation.
In contrast to what is white
in convention — lace, ivory, porcelain,
virginity, innocence — what is not
is beneath her feet: the polar bear skin rug, black lips
unfurled in a snarl, fur urinous.
Of course her skin recalls snow, but also bitten apple flesh
& her hair down her shoulder,
like blood across the bathtub’s marble rim.
Yes, Whistler reminds us white is
stench & sweat & pubic bone, & art’s abbreviations
for women are more bestial & ruinous —
so how else would I describe copper’s aging
but as a verdigris bruise? Amber to its insect inclusions
as a glass grave? Pearl as a shroud
to a sand grain?
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