Applause by Carol Muske-Dukes

Author:Carol Muske-Dukes [Muske-Dukes, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-8482-5
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-04-30T19:48:00+00:00

Monk’s House, Rodmell

—for Lynne McMahon

In her bedroom,

she set a convex mirror on a stand,

so that when the visitor

looked in

expecting to see the familiar

line of lip and brow,

what appeared instead

was the head up-ended—

the mouth a talking wound

above

the eyes, upside down, fluttering,

like the eyes in the skull

of a calf slung on the blood-hook—

or a baby’s lightning blink, dropped low

in the bone cage

about to be born

Walls washed down with the cold pardons of the nurse.

Gem green paint restored from old scrapings.

Here and there, a trifling, a lightening

beyond the author’s original intent,

which was, in the drawing room, positively spleenish.

From razor bits of palette, touch-ups: Mrs. Woolf’s favorite color.

The Trust ladies place the still-ticking brain

of Leonard’s wireless next to the empty brass stalk

with its single blossom: old black hat

she wore like pharaoh gazing down

the Nile-green Nile.

That’s her:

that flat drainboard of a face

set so fiercely against the previous

owner’s trompe l’oeil beard and jug.

The simpleton’s request: a picture of her young—

So the trees walk up burning,

the birds speak Latin

for the dull witted, drenched palette

the glimpse of whirlwind in the pond

where their handfuls of ash

drifted down

and over

the great mown meadow next door

where the Rodmell August Fair is on.

My daughter astride a steam engine,

bored as any child

with the past. Later makes an X

(her favorite letter) with two sticks

held up to the window

of the great writer’s garden study.

But the mirror standing in the air

a glass knot tying and retying itself

would repolarize, and she, drawing near,

reverse herself. A woman’s rapt beautiful face

drawn downward by gravity, sorrow,

lit upward by the flame of age—

could turn over, floating, then submerge, amniotic!

Across the green from her bedroom window

she saw it: a fin cleaving dark waters—

“and that became The Waves.” The ladies sip and look.

Vanessa, pregnant,

laughing, crosses the garden. Two women

walk among the hollyhocks with shears.

The hedge dented by one’s fluttering hands.

Inside her sister’s body: fluttering hands.

Annie’s white sweater catches

on the thorns of blackberry canes. I pull her free

then pick six little ones, busy, like the swarm cells

of a fetus. Or the enlarging failure in those rooms,

unchecked growth: death-drawn, claustrophobic.

The wind, up from the South Downs,

blew the two women across the garden,

their shadows like crossed sticks. Sisters.

One shrugging slightly, a loose mauve shawl.

Where her sculpted head sits now, a stone wall.

She sat at this table

eating mutton and bread.

He was talking about the socialist initiative

and she turned away: someone was knocking

at the window. It was the French photographer

we surprised on our way out,

shooting the forbidden

interior through the dark glass.

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