“So-called Sappho” and Other Poems

“So-called Sappho”

Halfway to the opulent hotel for his friends’ wedding, Not Baby, who can’t tell if the engineer’s attracted to her despite the scar or if desire veils it the way daisies—or any leggy wildflower—will a rut, nearly missed the enormous yellow crane that had fished a boat from the river and left it to pasture in wakeless blue.

#

It’s for working on the bridge, he reminded her. You know, winter or.

• #

“At whatever point you first allow matter to fall short, this will be the gateway to perdition,” as Lucretius warns.

• #

“Never not broken,” reads the banner the fox with the bandaged paw’s holding in the print she bought for the couple. (Hmm, the engineer—can to her can’t, will to her won’t—said.) A hare lies before it, gazeless, nosing its own skull-sized puddle of blood.

• #

Later they’ll wander through lobbies and ballrooms, under garnet chandeliers and Grecian murals, searching for the overly burnished bronze which isn’t, as its plaque claims, Romeo and Juliet, but maybe—given the sandals and crown of laurel—Daphne and Apollo, whose twin, as she tells the engineer, once anchored the foyer of her grandparents’ catering hall.

• #

 In the lofty hotel bed, Not Baby contemplates the caption of a New Yorker cartoon: “I need to leave you and the children and go to Tahiti if I’m ever going to be a truly great accountant.” On one side of an open front door, the wife, three kids, a dog; on the other, the husband with his carry-on and briefcase. It’s spring there, too, the trees spare, the birds Not Baby can’t hear singing tchee-rup, tchee-rup, as, here, her lover showers

•  #

Her cover of De rerum natura features a portrait from a Pompeian fresco—a detail less than ten centimeters tall in the original—of a young noblewoman often termed “the so-called Sappho,” who’s pressing a stylus to her bottom lip and holding a tabula cerata, a wax tablet used again and again for notes and memoranda and accounts and children’s lessons, since ceaseless the erasure of the everyday, the maids who’ll arrive soon enough with fresh soap and bleached towels to flush their hair from the sink.

•  #

When startled, or offended, the burst blood vessels bridging the engineer’s thin nose look, in the surrounding flush, less prominent, as when But don’t you ever, Not Baby will regret asking him when they stop on their way home to eat subs in a strip mall’s parking lot, find the world—the created world—unbearably ugly?

•  #

One used papyrus and ink mixed from cuttlefish pigment, wine dregs, and soot for stuff less evanescent—philosophy, say, drama.

 

 

 

Mary Celeste Syndrome

When Not Baby was a child, nobody lived in the big dollhouse, rearranging the cans of spam and corn in the cupboards, and nobody lived in the smaller dollhouse either, vinyl, with a clasp and handle so you could close it all up—trompe l’oeil chandeliers, ruby carpets, flocked wallpaper—and carry it, like a briefcase, with you.

•  #

Everyone lived in Hotel instead, a stack of empty shoeboxes. There were murders in Hotel, and also elevators made from smaller shoeboxes that Not Baby operated in soundless correspondence those long afternoons while her stepfather painted in his basement studio and her mother read mysteries in the kitchen, a little dark wisping around her slippered feet as if from under a door that led to another darkness too dark to see.

•  #

“My dear, I should like to know if any of your loves is dead—that one close by the water, for instance, or the one like [drawing of a flower] or [drawing of a brush] or [drawing of a running dog]’s girl so that you might get another in her stead,” Not Baby reads in a letter Dürer sent to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer, apropos of what who can fathom?

#

Midafternoon on a gloomy midsummer Friday and the rats are waving from shore, her lover said of his coworkers when he called, the speakerphone adding echo’s grim little undertow to the lone voice issuing from its warren of empty cubicles.

• #

“Honeybees are just like you and me. They need a mix of pollens to get all the nutrients they need so they can feed their brood and keep it healthy… But it’s corn, corn, corn, corn all over the place now,” the apiculturist on the radio lamented this morning, because—food shortages, pesticides—something’s, as he put it, knocking the socks off the bees.

•  #

At the top of the hill across from the fire station, Not Baby surveys the effect of the last polar vortex: a mile-wide swath of fog that’s obscured everything between lake and river since April, canceling the airshow and fireworks and leaving a stillness in its wake not unlike, she thinks, the stillness Mme deStael found at the center of Pompeii’s crossroads, “as if you were waiting for someone, as if the master were about to arrive, and the very semblance of life…makes you even more sad at feeling its eternal silence.”

•  #

Having been murdered and raped, “in that order,” one of Not Baby’s favorite protagonists arrives in an afterlife where “She had only to think, and the thoughts would appear incarnate before her. Ah, delightful! Splendid! It was, in truth, Paradise!” In Paradise, an unrequited love’s requited; a golden child is born. But in that “everlastingness …nothing is permanent. Nothing will stay.” Heaven, like thought, passes.

•  #

About dinner, she’d been trying to say—the clothes she’d brought over in the past months stuffed in a trash bag, her books in a suitcase, because who would Not Baby, beloved—a double negative, a not Not, be?—when the engineer hung up.

 

 

Old Flames

When driving past the paperboard factory, Not Baby once asked the engineer why the plumes from the stacks were sometimes dark and sometimes spectral, and learned instead about the Ringelmann scale, a series of five shaded grids measuring the opacity of smoke which, while somewhat useful for regulatory purposes, is limited by its empirical nature: e.g., the size and concentration of particulate matter, where the sun is, where you are.

•  #

Not Baby found herself, in the lull after the affair, as usual: belated, archival.

•  #

Until this morning, she’d misplaced the memory of scraps of laundry hanging over the rubble of a Sicilian town. Not Mascali, destroyed by Etna in 1923, but Poggioreale, leveled in an earthquake in 1968, five years before their “Grand Tour,” as her mother called it. A new town’s been built nearby, but old Poggioreale was left as it was, “a ghost town gazing with melancholy across the countryside at its modern successor.”

• #

 It was red before I had you, her mother’d say before disappearing into the bathroom with an ashtray and a box of L’Oréal.

• #

According to one myth, they’re shaped like Venus’s bellybutton? Not Baby told her 2^nd grade crush when asked about the round things bobbing in her thermos, at which he moved himself and the Speed Racer lunch box she’d been admiring to the next table.

• #

Not Baby doesn’t know where, elsewhere, her mother went that February night decades ago when the house across the way caught fire, only that she’d driven off again after one of her rages, “carried away by burning wrath,” as Juvenal put it, “like a boulder wrenched free from the cliff crashing down the precipitous slope.”

•  #

Well into a molten dawn of idling fire trucks and small explosions, Not Baby’s step father (who could be replaced, you know) sat silent in his briefs and undershirt with a cup of undrunk coffee, Not Baby in her strawberry-flecked flannel nightgown beside him.

•  #

It could’ve been you, Not Baby’s beautiful friend’s latest conquest—whose family lived in the new subdivision across the street—whispered in her ear one June-drunk high school afternoon. But Not Baby knew that was bullshit. Like Buridan’s donkey, who starved to death when equidistant from the same food, “a mind exactly poised between two parallel choices… would indubitably,” as Montaigne puts it, “never reach a decision.”

•  #

After her stepfather moved out for the last time, Not Baby, home for a visit, found herself paused over her mother, who’d slumped against the back door of the apartment next to a basket of just-bleached whites she’d hauled up from the basement, what breath she had after all those Marlboros escaping her.

 

 

 

“We take our fetters with us,”

as Horace says, “the way a struggling cur may snap its chain, only to escape with a great length of it fixed to its collar,” but at least, she thinks, she’d once taken hers elsewhere.

• #

Her mother rarely called with news while Not Baby was away, recounting, instead, plots of the mysteries she’d read, or, in later years, the shows she watched on the Sci-Fi channel. Not Baby—what were her alternatives?—would put the phone down and let her.

•  #

“Children playing in leaf piles may not be seen by cars and they are easily washed down our storm drains and into the lake,” she’d found in the paper this morning, and realized there’d been no dreams of losing the small-as-a-bar-of-soap baby in the bedsheets lately, and that, a decade earlier than expected—Not Baby grieves children, she does not want them—she can’t remember what she hopes was her last period.

•  #

Montaigne also valued what he called the “vocation of childlessness,” she’s read. He had a lone surviving daughter who couldn’t inherit, precluding the need to “proliferate in wealth to provide for a proliferation of heirs.”

•  #

It’s like everything but the kids is filler, a woman much younger than Not Baby chirped to the check-out girl yesterday as she unloaded two carts heaped with cereal and juice and popsicles and peanut butter, while Not Baby, basket at her feet, stood behind scanning last week’s article about the “unluckiest guy in history” whose head had purportedly been crushed under a giant projectile—a door jamb, an amphora of garum?—while trying to flee Pompeii before being preserved, as one historian put it, with everyone else under the mud and ashes like “prawns in aspic.”

•  #

Except the man’s skull wasn’t crushed at all, it turns out, but discovered intact in a nearby tunnel days later with a beautiful (if worn) set of teeth and a bag of gold and silver for the journey hung around its neck, since, “Oh,” according to Montaigne, “what a sagacious faculty is hope, which for a moment arrogates infinity, immensity and eternity to a mortal creature! What a nice little toy nature has given us there.”

• #

Poor Montaigne. Among the tedium recorded in his journal while visiting the baths at La Villa in search of relief for his kidney stones—the texture of gravel in his urine, the gallons of sulfurous water he drank—are local “novelties,” like the illiterate peasant woman, Divizia. “Ugly, thirty-seven, with a swollen neck,” she could “compose verses with the most readiness possible, bringing into them ancient fables, the names of gods, countries, sciences, famous men, as if she had been brought up to study.”

• #

But Montaigne found the poetry she delivered in his honor “just verses and rhymes,” though the delivery itself, he granted, was notable for its elegance and speed.

#

Resignation, stoicism—these aren’t emotions, but a kind of armor, the therapist Not Baby’s started seeing told her this afternoon when she’d related most of the above and wondered aloud whether “mother” was, most importantly, a verb.

• #

Not armor, she’d thought, pulling her cloak of privileged invisibility tighter.

• #

After La Villa, to Florence, where Montaigne was equally unimpressed by his visit “to see the women who let themselves be seen by anyone who wants,” and where, on Tuesday morning, he ejected a little red stone.