The Best American Poetry 2012 (21 page)

of his frown, his forehead; nay,

the pretty dimples of his chin and cheek—

Would you not deem it breath'd? And that those veins

did verily bear blood?”

*

I had noticed that they took

certain patients' families into a room

during the operations. Separated them

from where the others waited,

so it was obvious when the doctors came

and led a group into the little room, and shut the door.

You could hear the muffled something, the scuttle

in the dark that signaled pain,

which was why I began to sing,
It's fine,

during the operation, cheerful, witless,
It's fine, it's fine,

so long as they don't take us into that little room

which is what they did, three hours later, the doctor

and his trout-faced resident.

We have some news,

the doctor said, and as the door shut my father

turned to me with a look that read,

I will never forgive you.

So many models, so many bits of grotesquery—

In the museum is Robert-François Damiens who,

in 1757, was ordered to have his flesh ripped

with pincers and, by proclamation, “on those places poured

molten lead, boiling oil, resin, wax,

body quartered by horses, his limbs consumed by fire.”

The portrait of this pain, in its own way, a kind of compliment.

To make this man's suffering significant because

prohibitive, because

it would be the most intense form of privacy imaginable.

They tortured a person

out of the body that they killed, and then they changed this:

Guillotin remodeling the blade to sculpt the new

blood-wet window through which his “patients”

would look. To turn each death anonymous, communal—

“Passenger,” wrote Robespierre's epitaph, “lament not his fate,

for, were he living,

thou would'st be dead.” Insert yourself

inside this window. Crowds

pushing against soldiers, shrubbery, platforms, crowds

looking and feeling at another

just like themselves.

I am a man because I suffer,

the thin gas voice leaks inside the chamber, or is it,

I am a man because I make others

suffer in my place?

*

How much
enough
to call it evidence?

I thought my father would faint when he heard the results.

The insides seamed as if with. The diamond of the flesh turned into,

turned out of, it was hard to tell.

You have to imagine,
the doctors said.

To spend an afternoon combing these words. To walk

among the white pillars of the Temple of Poseidon

looking for the name some poet etched there once

as a kind of afterthought, rows and rows

of white stone, and no one could find it:

so many others had added names, dates, the pillars

had become a kind of cemetery,

but I was desperate for the remnant, the authority.

I needed to trace my fingers through the name, to step inside of it.

How deep the eye. How deep the knife, the hand, the imagination—

And once again we took off

coat and sweater, blouse and skirt. Someone came

and washed her scent off. The oils of her hair.

How much further and still be her?

They put a knife in. They took out lining

and consciousness, tissue, time, they took out speech,

then brought it back. And now

they give us another body, a littler one, and we start

the process over in reverse. The lenses, blouse, shoes, skirt,

makeup, hair oils. And added to it, the little

rubber breast padding for what's been lost—

I should have looked, like Tussaud, with my glasses

and my lock of hair.

I should have stood stretching out my hand for the perspective,

knowing it was only a thought that night that I

was the killer, I had the knife in hand, I was taking out the heart

and tongue, I was cutting off the fingers, it was me doing it,

that blood, that distance—

Nothing scraped at the floorboards. Nothing blew down and whistled

in the street. And somewhere an image

in the mind's blank cavern: the body's senseless

clawing out of color, its muds and greens and pallid lights.

You cannot tell just what the body is

or where the corruption will take it:

it is like trying to pinpoint the soul

as it animates the body: it exists, like a painting does,

between the real and imagined, where the wax itself

comes back to life.

They asked us to look

and understand the stain, the shadow on the X-ray

but the shadow was too much a shape

to be an idea as yet. We looked, and the shadow

turned into fist, a face, it blossomed

like a Japanese lotus in a dish of water, it turned

beautiful and remote, black sun around which

the ghostly others lost duration, turned themselves in orbit—

No,
the doctors said. And urged us to paint

the image thickly over, keep her untouched color

and shade, hue that recalls the vivid flesh

and just its opposite, to let dirt scrub into the cracks—

After the operations, she is

not only human but the state

of working toward humanity, away from it,

while in my mind her face can be remolded to last

longer than wood, longer than stone, to last

as long as there is wax, her image always at the point

of just emerging. Let me look. Here

are the cells with their rotten codes.

Here are breasts, belly, the still-pink organs ripe and flush:

myself liquifying into the family's

deathless increase.

I can see the swelling

in armpit, groin, the milk glands ripened in the breast. Passenger:

I had no idea what it meant,

lingering alone, black-eyed in doorways—

Take off the vest. Peel off the fragments

that are left, the sweat-stained

shoes and blouse, glasses, sweater: let us trace our fingers

through the names, let us add them to us, so that later

we can take it all away.

The drumroll is echoing in the chamber. It takes me down

where so many have gathered, crowds upon crowds

for the blood-wet window

through which each citizen must look.

The crowd shudders as the cord is cut. Shock

that travels through everybody. Makes a family out of every

body. Then isolates the patient.

They held my little X-ray up to the light and.

The king is dead. Do you believe it?

Passenger: touch this pillar for a sign.

Someone has to raise the head.

Someone has to imagine the other side.

from
Witness

MARY RUEFLE

Middle School

I went to Cesare Pavese Middle School.

The gymnasium was a chapel dedicated to loneliness

and no one played games.

There was a stained glass window over the principal's desk

and innumerable birds flew against it,

reciting Shelley with all their might,

but it was bulletproof, and besides,

our leaders were never immortal.

The classrooms were modeled after motel rooms,

replete with stains, and in remedial cases

saucers of milk on the floor for innumerable cats,

or kittens, depending on the time of year.

In them we were expected to examine ourselves and pass.

The principal himself once jumped off the roof

at noon, to show us school spirit.

Our mascot was Twist-Tie Man.

Our team The Bitter Herbs.

Our club The Reconsiderers.

It was an honor to have gone,

though a tad strict in retrospect.

You have probably heard that we all became janitors,

sitting in basements next to boilers

reading cheap paperback books of Italian poetry,

and never sweep a thing.

Yet the world runs fine.

from
Conduit

DON RUSS

Girl with Gerbil

Out of the no-place

of her not-yet-need she dreams

herself. Unmoved face of the deep

her mirror,

she sees as much as says

I am that I am. I make me now what first

made me: love renewed, bound up,

embodied—always life come burning

back. I prepare my house—

if cardboard, straight and true, a shoebox

Kleenex-bedded, riddled through

with stately constellations.

In time—in the growing

fullness of my time—I'll know myself

in knowing another. Some other one

and only me.

from
The Cincinnati Review

KAY RYAN