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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2007

The Second KnockCynthia Elaine King

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCE

THE SECOND KNOCK

By

CYNTHIA ELAINE KING

A Dissertation submitted to the

Department of English

in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded:

Spring Semester, 2007

ii

The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Cynthia Elaine King defended

on March 30, 2007.

_________________________

David Kirby

Professor Directing Dissertation

_________________________

Brenda Cappuccio

Outside Committee Member

_________________________

Andrew Epstein

Committee Member

_________________________

James Kimbrell

Committee Member

Approved:

_____________________________________________________

Nancy Warren, Director of Graduate Studies, English Department

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee

members.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Grateful acknowledgement is given to the following publications in which poems from

this collection first appeared:

The American Literary Review: "The Acme Speed-Queen"

The Cimarron Review: "Nose in Situ"

The Eleventh Muse: "Apology 33" and "Madonna and Child" (Qing Dynasty, 19th

Century)"

Ellipsis: "Even Now"

The North American Review: "Civil Aviation Code"

Poememoirstory: "obduracy"

Poetry East: "My Brother Learns to Pray" and "Paternity"

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ................................................................................................................... vi

FAT CHANCE ........................................................................................................ 1

Apology 33 ................................................................................................. 2

All in the Mind ........................................................................................... 3

Of a Feather ................................................................................................ 5

Catharsis 101 .............................................................................................. 6

True Crime ................................................................................................. 7

The Mother of Invention ............................................................................ 8

Your Arsenal .............................................................................................. 9

Sylvia Ties the Knot ................................................................................... 10

KOS ............................................................................................................ 11

Clean Jerk ................................................................................................... 12

Nose in Situ ................................................................................................ 13

DOUBLE OR NOTHING ....................................................................................... 15

My Brother Learns to Pray ......................................................................... 16

First Confession .......................................................................................... 17

Purgatory A ................................................................................................. 19

Objects of Diplomacy ................................................................................. 20

End Stop ...................................................................................................... 21

Paternity ...................................................................................................... 22

Foolery ........................................................................................................ 23

Obduracy ..................................................................................................... 24

Baby Ruby .................................................................................................... 25

Maternal Instinct ......................................................................................... 26

Madonna and Child (Qing Dynasty, 19th

Century) ..................................... 27

Saddled Horse (Tang Dynasty, 8th

Century B.C.) ....................................... 28

The Thank-God-I'm-an-Atheist Blues ........................................................ 29

GREATER THAN, LESS THAN ........................................................................... 30

Greater Than, Less Than .............................................................................. 31

Memo to Winter Regarding the Snow ......................................................... 32

Preface to Spring .......................................................................................... 33

v

Tough Buttons .............................................................................................. 34

Tensile Strength: Man Ray's New York (1917) ............................................ 35

Poetry ........................................................................................................... 36

When Proust Comes to Shove ...................................................................... 37

Free Speech .................................................................................................. 38

The Modern Sisyphus .......................................................................................... 39

Even Now ..................................................................................................... 40

A Cell of One's Own .................................................................................... 42

The Truth About False Alarms ....................................................................... 43

Uri Geller Dines Alone ................................................................................ 44

Minuet for Hamstring and Thigh ................................................................. 45

Great Swell ................................................................................................... 46

The Rose Engine .......................................................................................... 47

FOR ALL THE HARD-LUCK DRIVERS ............................................................. 48

The Hurricane's Alias .................................................................................. 49

Gasoline Rainbows ..................................................................................... 50

First Response ............................................................................................. 51

Air Mail ....................................................................................................... 52

An Inclination to Adore .............................................................................. 53

Resident Alien ............................................................................................. 54

Lost Contacts ........................................................................................... 55

To the Republic ........................................................................................ 56

Civil Aviation .............................................................................................. 57

The Acme Speed Queen .............................................................................. 59

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .................................................................................. 60

vi

ABSTRACT

The Second Knock is a compilation of poems composed between 2000 and 2006. It is

written out of a sense of curiosity and in an attempt to know the world and the people in

it. To see similarities and differences. To live in my imaginings and invite others in. It is

written in an attempt to rescue readers from a false sense of the world and themselves, to

save us from the popular media’s reduction of language into a series of clichés. It hopes

to subvert received ideas and imbue language with fresh denotative and connotative

possibilities, ideally inventing its own language through the particular use and context of

words.

Many of the poems deal with the struggle to come to a language that reflects and

communicates experience, although not necessarily my own. I communicate experiences,

both real and imagined, in an attempt to make sense of the messy business of life, to

bring chaos and confusion into order, even if that order is sometimes equally illogical or

absurd. Consequentially, many of these poems often rely on absurdist and surrealist

techniques; therefore, they depend heavily on figurative language and metaphor to

ground them in reality. I attempt to combine the familiar and the strange in hopes of

allowing readers to see the world in fresh, surprising ways.

Despite my exploration and sometimes interrogation of language, the poems in this

manuscript eventually come back to lived experience—both public and private, in our

crucial moments and prolonged phases, in our rituals and ceremonies. The poems take as

their subject not only language, creativity, and poetry itself, but also, of course, the usual

suspects: frustration, loneliness, alienation, desire, joy, loss, despair. Nevertheless, this

work is also a marriage of imagination and language—of imagined language and

"languaged" imagination. In as much as they communicate with readers, my poems invite

people to see the world as I do, providing a panoptical version of reality, one filtered,

reflected, and refracted through imaginative possibilities. My intention is to provide

readers with a wider sense of "the real" in a world where reality has become increasing

difficult to define.

I practice a “reading-into-writing” philosophy of composition, which means much of my

work is directly inspired by other poems. I am indebted to poets such as Vasko Popa,

Carlos Drummond De Andrade, and Zbigniew Herbert, whose work has often provided

the spark for many of the poems in this collection. The works of their translators,

particularly Charles Simic and Mark Strand and their anthology Another Republic: 17

European and South American Writers, have also been a strong influence on my writing.

In fact, some of my poems might themselves be seen as translations, of my lived

vii

experience and especially of my experience reading poems. Thus, some of the work here

has that feeling of translation, a tension or uneasiness within the syntax and diction.

Throughout most of the dissertation, I take a minimalist approach to writing, avoiding

what sometimes seems like dishonesty or mere ornamentation in other poems. By using

poetic exercises of my own invention, I often riff, repeat, and imitate poems until

something catches. I would like for the poems in this manuscript to reveal the kind of

playful energy, that sense of humor and escape I often feel when writing them. When

drafting a poem, I usually go on intuition and nerve, writing a kind of seat-of-your-pants

poetry that often fails. Revision and deliberation, however, have helped shape some of

these drafts into the poems in this collection. Nevertheless, trial and error play a large

role in my creative process, and I see my workspace as a kind of laboratory, where under

flickering bulb, I create poems out of the petri dish and test tube. Some of the poems here

reflect this kind of experimentation, exploring the opportunities that arise from the

accidental: cut-ups, homophonic translations, misread lines, generative exercises. While

the dissertation’s title implies luck, possibility, and a kind of blind optimism that is

distinctly American, the sections titles often undercut this notion with the skepticism that

I sometimes feel toward “experimentation.” Ultimately, my poems call attention to words

and letters themselves, from their sound and feel in the mouth to their look on the printed

page. I see these poems as a celebration of language and hope to communicate my love

for words and their appeal to our sense of sight, sound, drama and tension, and intellect.

Above all, I hope these poems reveal a kind of kinship or communication with those that

have come before them, and that they will somehow contribute, as do others, to the way

we see, or will see, this place and time. I would like for my poems to converse with our

culture in a way that at some times questions, subverts, and rebels against it, while at

others aestheticizes and enhances it.

1

Fat Chance

“It is better to wrong than irrelevant.”

—Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood

“But not even the most daring tamer would

ever dream of sending a leopard or lioness

out with a violin case. A bear on a bike is as

far as the human imagination can stretch.”

—Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher

2

Apology 33

Make no mistake, it was accidental,

an intermezzo, if you will, leaving you

somewhere eyeball deep in cream cheese

and barbiturates at your brother's bar mitzvah.

Yes, I've said au revoir, adios, and auf wiedersehen,

again and again (and again), you'd think I were

a paddlewheel waving goodbye to a river.

An old story, indeed, this aloha and arrivederci,

as dark as creosote and as ancient as Amenhotep's

pajamas. Ask why if you must, but why do bats

abandon barns at dusk? Why is an albatross an anchor,

an invisible agreement between fishing boats and air?

Please accept this accelerando of sorries,

forgive-mes, and apologies, if only an addition

to an accumulation of empty syllables.

And should you choose not to, say so long,

farewell, and adieu, I'll keep waving to you

until my wheel snaps off.

3

All in the Mind

Thoughts, like rabbits,

spring to it, such things as:

the mind can be small and neat,

closed like a book of hymnals,

or open like the singer's mouth.

Beautiful or criminal—

if only you could master it,

you might overtake the world.

And for those who are not

in their right one, the mind can be

controlled, first numbed, then warped.

It has its own state, the mind,

perhaps even its own country.

Yet in days like these, rarely

does something set it at ease

or give it peace.

The single-minded

often find themselves

alone. However, one may

change his mind,

be of two, or even three,

like the tree in which we

find three blackbirds.

You can make it up, but

can't take it anywhere,

in fact, it takes you

wherever it wanders; it

can be lost and never found.

You can take it off

or set it to something—

and the mind's got it all over

matter. Whatever's out of sight

is also out of the mind.

To be out of one's mind,

to see the best ones of your

generation destroyed by madness.

Sadly, the minds often meet,

starving, hysterical, naked

4

in the street, perhaps because the great

ones always think alike.

Some have one for business,

another for pleasure, and though few

would fess up, most minds

are quite filthy all the same,

the dirt, not your garden variety.

They say it's a terrible thing to waste,

so why not boggle or blow it?

It can be altered, like a suit,

should you outgrow it.

It has an eye, to be sure,

but no ear, although it may be

"of sound," either with

or without the body. It has

no mouth, yet you can speak it,

and if you’re feeling generous,

you may just give us a piece, though

we may not accept it; so much depends

on whether we've got one of our own.

5

Of A Feather

I don't know for certain but I suppose

one day you will lose your mind. You will,

however, be less alone as little by little,

madness overtakes your vacant heart the way

pigeons conquer a derelict building.

Slowly it will happen, this thing that prompts

the parakeet to peck at its reflection,

permits the parrot to talk to itself without

shame. Or maybe it will happen

all at once, thoughts gathering like

menacing storm clouds that break then suddenly clear.

One day you too will perch upon a ledge.

High above the street, you will see the world without

feathers and think how perfect it looks at this distance.

And I will pity you as I do the canary

who has lived all its life among humans

but nonetheless fails to become one.

6

Catharsis 101

The gunman went on waving

the pistol in the face of the terrified

customer, who had only moments

before purchased a rather large

and expensive birdcage. It was

summer and the sun had come up

but a few hours ago. It was already

hot and the gunman was as naked

to the waist as he was conspicuous.

He went on waving the gun

at the woman, who, at the request

of the management, had kindly

removed the .38 from her purse

before entering the premises.

The sun continued to climb. The light

through the shop windows made

merchandise, people, the shop

itself, into sundials. Time

passed. Shadows lengthened,

and the man continued to wave

his gun but now at the horrified

sniper, who had only hours

before offed a rather well-known

marksman at the zoo, a man who,

despite his great skill, shot a gorilla

executioner style. Still, the gunman

waved his weapon as if restraining

an injured blackbird, which, with

chambers empty, who's to say

that it wasn't. After all, this kind

of drama calls for a suspension

of disbelief; as for pity and grief,

we must aim for them, each fully

loaded with his own downy ammunition.

7

True Crime

My mother expects to be raped,

robbed, and beaten. She waits

for a man in a mask, a burglar

in black, who like a stagehand

will relieve the set of its dark

properties. She thinks a gunman's

coming. He'll make his way up

the stairs to massage the arthritic

lock and upstage the bedroom door's

opening. All the while my mother will lie

in her bed, quilt pulled up to her chin,

wishing for a bulletproof nightgown.

She watches TV through the snow

that cuts across the screen while

the real stuff piles up against

her window, and if it's me who comes

through her door, she makes it clear

to both of us who is the real criminal.

8

The Mother of Invention

It's no secret,

I scream in your face

nothing more.

We dance, stomping the life out of the music,

butcher the lyrics

and become important for a moment.

But I will go quietly,

with each step become smaller.

I wait for my lungs in the stairwell,

and for the return of my heartbeat,

which repeats itself, demanding to be heard.

Now I am ready to tell you everything,

those things for which I use my other mouth.

9

Your Arsenal

When will you learn

that this boomerang

grief is a thing that

will always come

back to you? Ever-

faithful to its master,

the harder you throw

it, the faster it returns.

As for me, I have learned

to step out of its way;

this grief pains the hunter

far more than its prey.

10

Sylvia Ties the Knot

She tugs and tightens the laces—

Tighter and more taut still

First—Needles—then—Numbness

Then blood, slowing to nothing

She chokes the neck of her ankle—

Her right foot, a paperweight

Without shake or struggle,

it knows the pong of death.

11

KOS

Ah, another declivitous morning,

thinks the farmer, light slanting

through the field, stalks splayed

with grain. A man of no consequence

hangs lopsided on a cross, head

askew as if to beg the blackbird's

pardon. Wicker man, fixture

of the birds, an empty sleeve

sloping earthward. A thrush

unstitches the straw at his wrist,

weaves a palm on the tree's bony

fingers. Nothing thwarting the scarts

and cormorants; whatever they touch

becomes theirs. The farmer remembers

the birds of his boyhood, ouzels

and scants descending on soldiers,

prone, torsos open like disheveled

chests of drawers. Men, supine,

like closets, whose contents

have spilled from their shelves.

The sun is slated to shine, the leaves

sieving its sunlight. The barn

falls in on itself, leans on the beveled

farmhouse. In town, the crooked

munitions factory seeks the support

of the warehouse. The farmer,

himself, is a basket man. He stands

as if raised from a rusty nail. He,

too, is italicized with age:

rye field, wry heart.

12

Clean Jerk

You were always Atlas-shouldered,

though you never quite bore the weight

of the world. You curled barbells

in the basement, lifted free weights

as if pulling up a pair of lead pants.

Once you were as solid as a statue, freed

from the marble by your own rage, but

now you couldn't choke your own dinner;

old age has forced you back into the rock.

Vaguely distinguishable from the overstuffed

chair, you sit and stare at the TV, with whom

you share your loneliness.

You were always a man divided—

stomach at home, heart somewhere

across town—you'd burst through

the door like a bottle rocket, one minute

whistling, the next, you'd explode.

Though you seldom spoke, you always

found the fists of language, the knuckles

of a word, that would blossom

upon impact, a fistful of violets

crushed under the skin. You'd whet

yourself on your wife and children; you

were always well-honed, but wondered,

still, why they became stone.

You might have been mistaken

for a murderer if not for your nametag,

your white coat far too bloody

for a doctor's. That you

were a butcher, you were to make

the slaughtered even more dead.

Sometimes you'd offer a grisly apology,

a rosy ham or a leg of lamb bouquet.

But they failed to see love, packaged

in that neat origami, refused to decrypt

the butcher paper, its gruesome hieroglyphs.

13

Nose in Situ

I too speak of the nose

but this nose is neither the red nose,

the shiny nose, nor the nose that stands

as a chimney on the house of my face,

nor is it the stuffy nose, the one which

serves as a monument to good taste

(although the mouth deserves some credit).

It is not the comedy nose,

the one attached to the funny glasses,

and is therefore not the running nose,

the sprinting nose, the nose you should

go catch. Yet is not a nose without

humor, not the nose that is as plain

as the one on your face.

It is not the crooked nose, nor is it

straight. It is neither the gay nose

nor the nosegay for that matter.

It is not the nose in love, nor is it a tragic

nose, but it does respond to unhappiness

with its own brand of slippery tears.

It is not the telltale nose, the hooked nose

nor the nose that is broad or flat;

it is not the nose of the oppressed,

the nose that is lynched, severed, or broken.

It is not the dry nose, the wet nose,

nor the one that bleeds, is pierced

or has been crowned with thorns.

It is not the nose out of joint

or the nose of the resurrected.

It is not a nose to believe in nor

is it one you should follow.

It is not a dirty nose or a brown

nose. It is not a Roman nose

and has yet to become nose of the year.

It is neither the coke nose nor the nose

-job nose and therefore has not been

voted Sexiest Nose Alive.

14

It is not a useful nose, the snoring

nose that saws through the dark wood

of night. Nor is it a cosmic nose:

This nose does not contain multitudes.

And no, it is not a nose's nose,

a timeless nose, or the nose's essence.

It may be all that the nose is not

in the fact that it lacks the nosiness.

It is but the grindstone nose,

the nose of the void, of oblivion.

This nose is the phantom nose,

that nosedive nose of imagination

and thus a nose that belongs in the air.

15

Double or Nothing

16

My Brother Learns to Pray

as my mother smokes, terry bathrobe

rounding her shoulders. Rumpled blouse,

ruined hose, she smolders in this habit,

twists a half-smoked cigarette into the table’s rose-

wood veneer. Crushed, empty, her face

is a beer can when she cries. Its features hate

each other, the lazy left eye envying the right.

Her nose, disgusted by breath, fills with spite,

drips toward the lips that curse the ears

for listening, for their mute and drooping

righteousness. She has faith in cosmetics,

their power to bring the face back together.

Lipstick, mascara, she waves the magic wands,

corrects her eyes and mouth with a tissue,

as if making the sign of the cross, her made-up

face as out of place as the toaster in the bathroom.

Dead on her feet, she wears reptile shoes, spiky

coffins for her toes. They know the highs and lows

of kitchen calisthenics. From sink to cupboard,

cabinet to stove, they snicker and stab the linoleum.

My brother is high-chaired in He-Man pajamas,

pilled, high-watered, he surges and spills, arms

lashed behind him with speaker wire, hands

assembled, as we are, in this backward kind of prayer.

17

First Confession

I've lost my husband to a "scag," the Scaglietti he proclaims is his pride

and joy, itself an emblem of our sports-car life. And indeed, we are the envy

of the neighborhood, never mind the tickets, traffic school, the course in anger

management, or that we no longer fuck face-to-face, a love embrace only sloth

and human own the anatomy to enjoy. He has handed down his greed,

heart-rot of the family tree, to our teenaged daughter, whose budding lust

for cosmetics and clothes crams nearly two walk-in closets. Designer dresses, lustrine

party gowns. She's wild in violets and pinks, but he thinks she's as sweet as the pride-

of-California that's overtaking our lawn, buds spiting bulbs I buried beneath greeds

and compost last fall. Failed blooms, but still I see them underground, growing envy

green of the wildflowers. Meanwhile, his oversized mower fossilizes like a giant sloth,

extinct in the garage. If I mention it, it's a scene straight from Don't Look Back in Anger,

dinner theatre of the dining room, constant kitchen-sink drama. I'm slow to anger,

actually, frustration fermenting for years before becoming vinegar while he lusts

after pool girls, those mothers of pearl and daughters of zirconia. My rage is sloth-

slow, a stealthy predator, invisible in tall grass, but it pounces as merciless as a pride

of lions, tearing flesh from baby goats, devouring injured antelopes alive. I envy

the life of a lion king whose duties exclude hunting and rearing cubs who greedily

feed from even sleeping mothers. My own mother would always play greedy

glede with my brother and me. It seemed when Father went away, her anger

went with him. And the way he spoke of business trips provoked no envy—

endless flights to Sydney and Western Australia. But oh, the souvenirs, lustrous

minerals and gemstones, my favorite, the rectangular prisms and plates of priderite,

a polished black piece I keep with a snapshot of him and me, sitting in a sloth-

tree on a trip to South America. But memory is nothing more than a murky sloth,

a miry, muddy place of the subconscious, overgrown with the green greeds

and duck weed of years, where imagination is like a slithering sand-pride

that disrupts the surface, then disappears, leaving us sometimes with anger

and at others with a mysterious sense of joy. The past, however illustrious

and renowned, gloriously laurelled, lauded, and crowned, will still be envious

of the present, its younger, more beautiful daughter. My analyst insists it's penis envy,

but to reduce a woman's woes to a desire for a dick is like mistaking a sloth

for a spider monkey. Besides, who would want one, given its routinely lack-luster

bed show? Oh, we all know that communication is the key ingredient

of a healthy marriage, but when I express how I feel, he says if I'm so angry,

I should shave my head, become a lesbian, and march topless in a Gay Pride

parade. Lord, please teach me generosity, to love, not envy the greedy.

Let kindness conquer sloth and self-control contain my anger.

18

Oh, Lord, won't you lustrate my soul, allow me to finally swallow my pride?

19

Purgatory A

Breath flips through ninety-six channels.

God thumbs through a thesaurus in search of a new name.

The soul jumps like a man on fire.

A fugitive folds the future into a paper boat.

Silence nibbles crumbs from a Persian rug.

Blood breaks the record for the 100-yard dash.

Light falls like a would-be suicide from a second story window.

20

Objects of Diplomacy

We rarely see anything in nature that doesn't accomplish

exactly what it wants to. The bird on the wire expects

no applause. Heaven becomes invisible in two ways.

The fog rolls out and the tide comes in.

Whitecaps unfurl like flags of surrender.

We participate in nature when we are alone,

experience heaven in the great abandoned airports.

In heaven, there is no sleeping, only pretty things,

like the people we become when no one is watching.

If God made man in his own image, he must have

done it before he created the mirror.

21

End Stop

It appears as a drop of rain, or a mole

on the face of your beloved, takes the shape

of a beetle in an approaching storm.

It is not a death sentence (that can be

reversed) or the last stop on the spring

train: emerald terminal, green line.

It is the sun-bleached skull

in the middle of the desert

in which each of us hears the howl of the ocean.

Take it as a sign, this punctuation,

use it with discretion

or replace it with fear.

22

Paternity

Someone is the grass.

Another is the mower.

A third is my father.

The mower grabs

The grass by the green

Of its hair, cuts it to confetti.

The grass grows back.

The mower quits,

Overcome by a feeling

Of emptiness

My father kicks it,

Pushes the mower

Down a hill.

He fetches the gasoline

And burns

The grass black.

The grass grows back

There is another mower.

I become my father.

My father becomes the grass.

23

Foolery

I think of you as I do a tomato,

which is not to say you are technically a fruit

or that most consider you a vegetable;

it's just that you share a first name

(or at least custody of the first three letters).

But then again, perhaps I should think you a turkey,

or maybe a virile cat, or even a girl who only behaves

like an adventurous boy. In this case, you could be dangerous,

though it's hard to see you as a weapon. Tomahawk,

axe's stone-headed brethren, are you merely some kind of tool?

What could you have in common with a tomb, vault, or chamber?

In your embrace, I feel the furthest thing from dead.

I know your kind of drum, tom-tom, twice-named for your libidinous music.

All things aside, you must have something to do

with my future, with the day that follows

today, that is to say tomorrow.

24

obduracy

b and d are expectant

birth death

who wouldnt be

belly to belly they resist

each others company

yet would prefer to be bound

proud mothers of the stubborn

of bosoms and derrières

why not bend a little

see yourselves beyond doubt

doubled upon reflection.

25

Baby Ruby

Puberty, the gag age.

Age 12, no say.

Persuade,

Engage,

way

late,

day

12.

.12

gauge.

Get ready

for the big day.

26

Maternal Instinct

Her story begins with a broom,

its bristles cut from a golden field,

where her thoughts want to roll

and themselves become golden

and the wind runs barefoot through

the grain, takes up her hair like a hobby.

She sweeps until she collects enough dust

to hatch me in the corner, holds me

close in a failed attempt to press me

back into her body. When I am

old enough for pants, she stitches up

the flies to keep my under-things

in order, irons my slacks while I'm still

in them. I am pressed to the point

that I am thin enough to slip through

the screen door without it sighing.

This is her mistake, not mine.

Her story ends, I go on sweeping.

27

Madonna and Child (Qing Dynasty, 19th

Century)

The Blessed Virgin holds the Chinese baby

Jesus, confines Him to her lap's narrow

world in the porcelain weave of her arms.

Beneath the stiff white toukui,

her face is wrought with worry—

such a happy baby is the Asian Son of God.

Standing on his toes, he smiles, knows nothing,

has yet to learn of His burden and the sins

of all mankind. No crucifixion or resurrection, His infant

wisdom knows no fear. The Messiah desires nothing

beyond the blanc de Chine

of his mother's breast, but the Chinese Mary is glazed

with dread, made for trade with the West, she prays

He is the only Savior

and not yet another of Buddha's incarnations.

28

Saddled Horse (Tang Dynasty, 8th

Century B.C.)

There is a white horse

who looks as if he has

been crying, century on

century of iodine tears.

The saddle, too,

has been crying,

strapped to this grief-

stricken horse for years.

Destined to be ridden

by the same grave

message, this voiceless

horse has been saddled—

On thunderous hooves

comes news from the under-

world, that distant headline

we will someday hear.

29

The Thank-God-I'm-an-Atheist Blues

Devil I've crept with spiders

I've buzzed among the flies

I've rolled along these railroad

tracks conducting sinners' lies

Known jackals and hyenas

I've learned their shuck and jive

Know all about those reptiles

Who eat each other alive

And now for my appearance

I've asked the goats for hints

I've customized these old red shoes

To follow your hoof prints

Know everything they told me

And everything I've read

I long to keep Hell's furnishings

And help you rule the dead

So hurry Devil take me

Touch me with your flame

Before my eyes look Heavenward

By God it looks like rain

30

Greater Than, Less Than

31

Greater Than, Less Than

The snowflakes fall

in the middle of the night,

white vanishing into whiteness.

But if this theory of white were to fail,

the lesser white would prevail

and the snow could collectively

clear away the plows.

32

Memo to Winter Regarding the Snow

Though I respect

your icy authority,

why must you blind

us with this colorless

conformity? Have you

no mercy?

Blizzards of ailing

asterisks, why gather

them into pallid drifts

when to Spring

they collectively

stand for nothing?

33

Preface to Spring

The driveway is filled

with black snow.

I never saw so many

snowflakes

when they were white

and drifting in the air.

34

Tough Buttons (Père-Lachaise Cemetery)

Stein stone

tomb tome

pebbles poems

letters bones

concrete conceit

cement lament

iron wreath

wrought grief

death due date

above beneath

35

Tensile Strength: Man Ray's New York (1917)

New York. You've seen it so often,

there's no need for explaining: precious

yet chromed, grounded but rising.

But in the years since its picture

was made, the C-clamp (that make-

shift hunk of guesswork) can no longer

quell our doubt. Now even recorded

ages can kill you, unlike what

you had once considered bad art.

36

Poetry

Poetry is language

on trial.

It can do nothing

but represent itself.

37

When Proust Comes to Shove

Death is life

that is lived

in quotation.

Nostalgia,

a remembrance

of things passed:

inspections,

exams,

the buck,

and gas.

38

Free Speech

Quotations are feathered words:

"Time flies when you are having fun."

But a quote cannot float framed

with question and answer:

the u, o, and t

will not sort themselves

out.

39

The Modern Sisyphus

It's not easy being a vampire's shadow:

Vlad's valet, Martha Stewart to The Prince of Darkness.

Renfield dreams only of shorter nights and longer days.

Life eternal, perpetual death— he cares nothing for contradiction.

Neck bite or bolt, to him it's all the same.

Dead and undead, who are the real victims?

"The working man," wheezes Igor who drags away

The Count's bloodless leftovers. He has it no better:

mad man's Mighty Maid, Florence to Doctor F.,

orderly to ogres who have the cheek to call him "Eyesore."

His work has made him the monster. Stooped and hunchbacked,

he has complexion of a surgical glove, teeth the color of flypaper.

The end of the day boils down to little more

than snuffing out the castle's torches,

drawing curtains on an angry mob.

All is well, all is well.

One must imagine them happy.

40

Even Now

In the fluorescence of my prison cell

I reread the words scrawled across a slip

of paper. My son writes of William Penn,

another good man jailed, and I picture stocks

crayoned in brown, a timber frame with round

cuts for head and hands, on his book report.

A schoolboy now, he has recess and report

cards, though an inmate of his crib's tiny cell

only yesterday, where he studied the round

and round motion of pastel sheep. I, too, slip

into sleep, counting candy-colored livestock

as it leaps the low gate of his play pen.

Crafty Convict Escapes State Pen

headlines my imaginary news report.

Improbable, still I invent a smiling stock

clerk, carefree and more than willing to sell

whatever miracles would help me slip

off before the guard makes his next round.

Memories overlap like voices in a round,

some singing light, lovely as down on a pen,

my wife in her stockings and half-slip

in the flicker of the nightly market report.

At the stove, she checks a can for the sell-

by date, empties its contents into a stock

pot. She cares nothing for the stock

market, knows nothing of its round

about ways. The shares I didn't sell

plummeted like plumes, worthless pen

feathers. The income I failed to report,

money owed in back taxes. I always slip

up when recalling that night. Illicit details slip

away, but the lawful stay, officers taking stock

of my situation, one writing a police report,

another knocking on doors, trying to round

up witnesses, a woman idly chewing a pen

cap between words softly spoken to a cell-

phone. My finger's slip fired the round,

stock to shoulder, nerves sharp as a pen

41

knife. The report echoes in my every cell.

42

A Cell of One's Own

She's putting her self on,

cell phone and cigarette case.

She's selling herself on the phone.

One sale, one home,

her cell phone.

Being oneself at home,

O, to be home and alone.

Speaking to cigarettes

and smoking the phone,

she's putting herself on.

43

The Truth About False Alarms

Who pulled the fire alarm for the third time

this month in the small dark hour before sunrise?

Who, save for a fire chief, might see beauty

in practiced emergency? Might these petty

acts of terror form the rungs upon a ladder

for the entry-level arsonist? What drives your heart

to recklessness, to be itself the red engine, throbbing

through this neighborhood of sleeping bodies?

Who do you wish to impress, the laundry room,

its jury of empty washers? Perhaps you are sweet

on the vending machine, which tenders only apathy

to those without quarters. Maybe you did it on a dare,

were bullied by the tiny hammer, mocked by the thin

pane of glass that stood between you and the lever.

Could this be an elegy to pranks played in high school?

Perhaps you pulled it as one does his youth

from the smoldering ash of memory. How we must

amuse you, ambling from our apartments, half-dressed

in these rehearsals, accompanied by the music

of slippered feet as we shuffle and scuff down the gritty

stairwell. Are we but comic relief in these ill-conceived

productions? Perhaps you find a mother in the streetlamp

where we gather like tired children in its skirt of light.

Maybe you are moved by the way we rub our eyes,

feel a kind of tenderness for how we hug ourselves

in the wind. But what company are we, strangers

who merely come together against the cold?

What friendship can our frozen words offer, when they rise

with our breath then disappear? Please won't you tell us,

if you are here, what boredom is snuffed out,

what loneliness extinguished.

44

Uri Geller Dines Alone

He knows the narrative in advance

as if he's read the novel. He will watch

the story as it plays out before him.

She will take her dish to the sink

She will wash her hands

and dry them on her apron

She will switch on the TV

She will smoke

What she doesn't know, he thinks,

is the mystery—the cause and effect,

the reap and sow of it all. She is both

the problem and the solution,

the zero that makes love to the one.

He believes she sees him as the kind

of man the man who sends a fork to do

the job of a knife. But he knows the knife

and its irony, how it makes the wound

but also cuts away the tunic, fashions

muslin into bandages. She is a tourniquet

for the neck, controlling the bleeding

but stopping the breath.

He was once the water that wished

to be wine, the soap who refused to lather,

aroused by its own slickness. He remembers

the early days, his feelings conjured up

and pulled from his sleeve like so many

multicolored scarves—it was love,

nonetheless, however routine and diaphanous.

She is the lead who won't forgive

the alchemist for failing to make her golden.

Though not a mentalist or magician,

she risks a few predictions:

Knife in hand, head bowed over dinner,

he will subtract himself from his own equation.

She watches as he bends to the spoon—

The spoon has the stronger will this time.

45

Minuet for Hamstring and Thigh

From the pint-sized, Friday-full, piano-grinned bar

comes small shouting and laughter. The music begins,

and it sounds like the rumbling out back, empty boxcars

begging to be freed from the railroad track and let in. The song ends

with a moan that gropes its way through the valves and bends

of a horn. I imagine my mother's face, lips pursed in mid-sip of gin.

Somewhere within the singing crowd, her twisted and unholy face,

abhorring the dance floor as it drizzles with ephemeral dances—

the Whiplash and Car Crash—her feet, firmly anchored in place,

moored to a barge of a man, unflappable in his broken-down wingtips,

unmoved, even as a bass busts out the windows and strips

the paint from a broken-down song. Meanwhile, I chance

a glimpse at a half-emptied face, one obscured by a two-sided mask,

neither comic nor tragic—one side a cigarette, the other, a cocktail glass.

And from the mouth of this moment, a whisper, urging me to ask

if it's possible, still, for a Friday night on the town to knock the rust

from a punch clock face, un-frown the iron grimace of the workweek.

Can this place make the meek locomotive-strong, freeing them at long last?

46

Great Swell

Okay, let’s try it again,

then. Everyone I know

and every one I don't

and everyone else

just goes on singing,

in a pitch I cannot

hear and a key I

can't imagine. I go on

listening, separate

the layers of sound

like a cake whose belly

I slit from navel to chin,

of whose girdle of icing,

I wish I could sing.

I would just as soon

leave it alone. Stop

in the aluminum

chorus of this dish

room and sing

for the mice who've

been nibbling the strychnine,

whose feet, in their madness,

scratch an unplayable

score in the dust.

I would sing for the gypsy

moth, to the syncopation

of its wings, as it tries to free

itself from flypaper.

I sing for trumpet fingers

lost to the slicer and for

the baker's blindness, coming

on faster than twilight

through the kitchen window.

I sing for the walk home,

swallowing their songs, hoping

they will be beautiful in my mouth.

47

The Rose Engine

Rose engine, an appendage for loathing,

lips equipped for lathing speech into cursive,

cursed words, curved patterns, changeable cutting

tools. Fine fingers, machines for shaping, manipulating,

aping the fools in the garden. Root ball, root bound, just below

heaven, just above ground. My blue daze wilts in a bucket. A foot

falls in the Garden, sown with grains of Paradise. Wine press or word

press, stock phrases fermenting in the mouth. Fragrant flowers, savory herbs,

bench-press nouns and milk-toast verbs. It’s dayroom and daisies all the day long.

CAUTION: CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE! May burst into song.

48

For All the Hard-Luck Drivers

49

The Hurricane's Alias

I can't gauge where you're going,

ask, "How far? How fast?"

But like a barometer,

you make only vague predictions,

talk of tomorrow's weather.

"More clouds," you say,

"the color and weight of cement."

50

Gasoline Rainbow

You think of joy

as a fossil fuel:

finite and costly,

useful only

in the moment

it's destroyed.

51

First Response

You have been cautioned to discontinue use,

but you persist, applying heat and pressure.

Your application is neither even nor thin,

your occupation, to spread yourself,

to be taken all at once, in the evenings,

toppling the nightstand, racking up bed time.

You have always been rash, ignoring

the stop signs, refusing to brake

out of tenderness. To keep out of reach,

to avoid contact, results in prolonged

inflammation. At the increased risk of my heart's

own failure, you never will burn unattended.

That night you required immediate attention.

As means of prevention, I sprinted up stairs,

skipping steps when restraint should have been

exercised. Now I've worked out the days, but

you close your eyes. I detect side effects;

you are spotting the symptoms.

You are pregnant, or think you may be,

or may become pregnant. Never apparent,

your first response. You blink

several times, feel something—

rainbows, halos, some foreign body.

52

Air Mail

If a prolonged childhood accounts for man's superior intelligence,

I should be the smartest woman on earth. I should have known when

you asked me to your flat, that you lived in an empty wallet, that when

you said you were paying your dues, you were doing it on credit. And

when you told me you take your women like your Scotch, I should have

guessed that you meant "neat" before deciding to move in. You even said

you were a liar, and I believed you, but only for that instant, was sure from

that point forward you'd always speak the truth. So please accept this gift,

which will show me that it's working, even when you're not. Let what

began with pebbles at my window end with this brick through yours.

53

An Inclination to Adore

If I ever raised my pen, wrote your portrait

and drew your name, might I draw you closer,

more right than you have ever been?

Is there more behind your smiles than nerve

and muscle? Lies, if the i should swap places?

The yes in your eyes is never as plain as the no's

on your face. Your nose, sharp as a quarter

moon or hangnail, beautiful and unbearable.

I listen to the ice in your voice, jellyfish

words that go on stinging long

after their transparent lives. I see

through winter to the pane no one knows

but the window in its blue inclination to a door.

The sound of teal is terrible, not a word for

your irises, whose petals are more crushing than kisses

and all the colors they signify.

54

Resident Alien

Yesterday I found my last picture

of you, an INS X-ray, stashed in a manila

envelope and filed away as if evidence

from some long-forgotten crime scene.

I imagine you sitting for this portrait,

naked to the waist and cold, a bodiless voice

commanding that you take a deep breath

and hold—you inflate yourself with oxygen

as if preparing to swim to me across

the Atlantic on a single breath, or as you

did in the glow of your birthday cake,

after making the wish I could never grant you,

no matter the cake or number of candles.

An X-ray, a silhouette, a window into the body.

How I recognize your posture, arms standing

away from your torso as if strangers, lungs, a gray

galaxy of sinew and stars. But this is the way I’ve

always known you, close and distant at the same time.

If only you had held me to the light,

had a look inside my body, past the still,

gray heart to a spine that's scarcely visible,

or perhaps just isn’t there.

55

Lost Contacts

I can see lids tight

in this case multipurpose

a problem a solution

over man- I squeeze

with these made tears

56

To the Republic (For Which It Stands Like Water Over a Troubled Bridge)

If someone says that it is certain,

tell him to come here, to put

his hand over his heart and swear

to pledge his allegiance to the truth,

to see it lying with the trash in

the oily streets, or slumped behind

the wheel of a burned-out Chrysler.

Show him fact where it splatters

on the soles of the feet of the people

who are running in every direction.

Make him see how these arms that are open

to the East reach with greedy hands,

branding irons that glow in

the all-night incinerators. Teach him

that the affection he hears in the voice

is the mortician's love for the body.

If he insists it is for sure, invite him

to smell the libraries and books that have

become heaps of ash, and if that's not enough,

make him see the age spots on his mother's

hands, the spouse and child he'll never have,

Or if nothing else, the dollar bills that will walk in,

have a look at him, and forever make an exit.

Urge him not to be fooled by this nation

whose colors do run, red chasing blue

atop their cut-rate cop cars, searchlights,

white and righteous, streaking through

backyards. The flag wags like the tongue

of an idiot, excluding most hues from its truncated

rainbow, its grim and abbreviated spectrum.

57

Civil Aviation Code

They may have been speaking Zulu, for all we knew, their Dixie-

thick drawls and Yankee-doodled dialects, dragging the battered

luggage of language from concourse to curbside. They'd bounce

it to the baggage crews who'd pass it through unchecked, undetected

by the X-ray machines. We wet our words with whiskey while brewing

at the bar, slurring to any server who'd listen, head cocked to one side,

like the Victor dog, baffled by the crackle of his master's voice, the overgrown

speech of an electric Easter lily.

Taxiing down the tarmac, the lingual lint rolls from our tongues'

velvet uniform. Sitting cheek to cheek in the shoebox of our airline

seats, we carry on clipped conversation, air traffic controlled and snipped

like verbal thorns from the rose of the mouth. The captain

conducts his slow-spoken tango, soaring high above the Sierra Nevadas,

all Romeo dreamy in the cumulous clouds. Cool as Quebec,

his mama-papa-thank-you-speech could earn him an Oscar. A November

politician at the cockpit mic, his tooth-white words to the passengers

ring clean as lima beans throughout the cabin. With kilo on kilo of spoken

cocaine, we forget our Juliet threats for a while.

We were bound to be snared in those linguistic lassos, semantic slipknots,

the Indian rope tricks of talk, cobra dancing from their lips' loose weave.

Their tales of turbulence tall as luxury hotels, empty as air pockets, mere pacification,

pitted and pocked as the golf balls they'd putt down the aisles of vacant planes.

They'd foxtrot around the truth as they would with your wife or daughter, close,

but careful not to step on any toes. Hoping we'd be doped by the echolalia

of jet engines, delta waves that rock us into the muddy waters of sleep,

where the creek learns to speak from the river.

But when the landing gear begins to drop, the mounting pressure pops

in our ears, a cerebral Charlie horse of sound, the wheel squealing,

touching down, triggering the bravos and backslaps, the spoken reruns of the runway.

We strain in our seatbelts, refraining from tray table manners, ignoring

58

the illuminated signs. In our relentless surge toward the terminal, we endlessly

miss the connections, fail in finding the twenty-seventh letter to fit an impossible

alphabet.

59

The Acme Speed-Queen

She paves her ways with a steamroller,

flattening the evening like a single-

sided record that she plays for me

when she wants to remember. She thinks

it sounds as smooth as it looks, but when

I listen, I hear no music over

the crackle of hot tar and gravel.

She blends a cocktail to prove she knows

the difference between mixed up and confused,

and before pouring, murmurs her name

into my tumbler. I drink, feel it at the back

of my throat, soft and scratchy like fiberglass

soaked in a whisky sour. She takes

the shape of whatever lies

on top of her, becomes a backward

impression; a mattress fits her better

than any body. And like all of the people

she meets, I come with my jackhammer,

tear up the one-way street,

her breath skips like the sound of a needle,

skating always toward the next song.

60

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Cynthia Elaine King was born and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. She received a

B.A. from the University of Toledo and an M.A. from the Center for Writers at the

University of Southern Mississippi. She has conducted writing workshops for the

Runaway with Words program and has taught at various colleges and universities in the

South.