cheek chilling against the claw-foot tub’s icy porcelain.
(Shrimp in the colander slackening in their shells under the tap. Clams coming unhinged in the steamer basket. Lobster claws ringing the sides of the pot like the struck tongues of bells.)
This unease, the disrupted complacencies, that wildness in the dark. You soften and pink in heat and steam. Doors and windows blow wide open.
Outside, fleecy herds of black clouds stampede a wan yellow half-moon who lingers in the sky like a fermata. (A pause. Caesura. Breath waiting to happen.) Effaced moon staring into nebulous space, listening to the unreliable narration of the wind—woolgathering moon, who daydreams the entire night out of silence into the brittle, silver tinfoil of winter morning’s birds.
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.
As a child, I weld the words centimeter and sentimental together because my mother pronounces centimeter as senchimental (sen-chee-mental), which sounds much like sentimental to me.
When measuring her knitting, she counts out loud, under her breath: “One senchimental. Two senchimental. Three senchimental.”
I don’t know exactly what sentimental means, but it seems to summon forth some vintage, thrift-shop version of “love”—steeped in nostalgia’s mothballs, crimped with a wry twist of camp. It makes me think of the red construction paper and lace doily valentines we make in elementary school—slightly sour skins of Elmer’s glue peeling off our fingerprints—or those chalky candy hearts embossed in Courier font with words like “Yowza!” and “Hubba hubba!” It reminds me of the stuffed white cat with a red ribbon around its neck my mother stores inside a wooden crate in her closet—underneath her hand-painted silk kimonos, along with my father’s gold football from high school that hangs on a chain, and the oddly drawn, explanatory pictures of buffalo on onion-skinned blue airmail paper sent to her in Japan from my American grandparents’ ranch in Wyoming the year they spent apart before eloping.
One senchimental. Two senchimental. Three senchimental.
My mother’s knitting needles are gleaming and sharp. Her tongue is even sharper.
I confuse love with knitting and think love is quietly meted out like the sweaters my mother knits for me, centimeter by centimeter. Soft rasp of yarn tugged from the unraveling skein of Red Heart worsted purchased on sale at Woolworth’s, rapid patient ticking of the knitting needles’ shiny syncopated clicking, red loops bleeding out from the needles and dripping into a complex network of Knit and Purl that ultimately takes the shape of something one can concretely name: red sweater.
