Read an Excerpt

Four-Legged Girl

Poems

Graywolf Press

    Jump rope song

    Beautiful blankness, I saw you once
    in a bucket of glue, on the flank of a horse with glass
        eyes,

    in a gown and the girl's ankles were shaking,

    in Dream Whip, in hawk shit, in comfrey, cress,
    campion, potato vine, pokeweed, lopseed, the dodder,

    the clover and the honeysuckle flower, white as
        boiled bone.

    White as boiled bone until it yellows,
    like the poof of hair on nursing-home women, Bunco
        dice,

    scrimshaw of the HMS Agamemnon on a sperm-whale
        tooth,

    hind quarters of a white-tailed deer, hind end
    of a hare, of a Welsh cow who's born like milk and
        dies like butter.

    Born like milk and dies like butter, like batter after
        you add the eggs,

    those orbs with a beating heart inside, yellow foam
    on the lake by the bowling alley, blank pins gone gold,

    and the trophy mother won, and her rayon sweater
        soaked in beer.

    Her rayon sweater soaked in beer, her ivory hand
        mirror
    turning toward amber, glass of the hurricane lamp and
        the monocle,

    the paper holding the poem about the monocle, even
        the floor, gold.

    Even the floorboards. Rag rug. Lamb nightlight.
        Waning
    moonlight on hospital sheets on the line, and the
        christening gown

    brushed with pollen, cut into costumes for canaries.

    Costumes for canaries, for lovebirds, aprons for dolls,
        all
    lined up under the mock orange tree, and where is the
        girl serving

    buttermilk in thimbles, is the girl in the blossomhouse
        gone?


    As a child I ate and mourned

    Now I will not eat. I will not mourn.

    Bowls of glistening peaches.

    Bowls of them, I tell you.
    Golden, with a menstrual stain where the pit was
        pulled away.

    On one of my daily strolls into the next-door cemetery
    I encountered the hog snake, which even then was put
        on earth
    to represent the antithesis of the working stiff.

    The funeral director set a house trailer
    on the cemetery edge to serve as a chapel
    for grievers. It was cold in there, even in summer,
    the paneling warped.

    A cheap box of tissues on the card table.
    I slid one out and balled it up, stuck it in my mouth.
    Those were paper-eating days.

    The gravedigger, his shovel carried over his shoulder
        like a musket.

    I was pure of soul. I was.
    Chosen to play the angel in every drama about God.
    I had things in the right order:
    i.e. the body is but a playhouse for the soul, all that.


    It seems, back then, there was a mythic teapot

    A napkin holder shaped like a garden gate with
        painted
    trumpet vines. The old couple whose goodness was
        unassailable.
    They slapped their knees when they laughed at our
        antics,
    which were really not that funny. Chewing graham
        crackers
    into the shapes of guns. The old couple, Mr. and Mrs.
        Riddle.

    Their drab mouths, their teeth in a jar, their dishes
        and glassware
    the color of the amber that traps mosquitos. Their
        house edged
    in yellow gladiolas I called flower pokers. My father's
        tumors
    bloomed like thought balloons in cartoons but inside
        them was
    only a sigh. My mother set her hair on fire leaning
        over a lit

    cake and it seems her hair was on fire for many days.
        Or was that
    the lady with the red bouffant whose big thighs shook
        when she
    walked up the sidewalk toward the place called
        Beauty, where she
    got her hair piled and pinned. The mice in our house
        were tame,
    willingly incorporating themselves into our games. Tail
        hanging out

    of the dollhouse window. A wasp hid in my
        underpants and stung
    my biscuit. My mother called it my biscuit. My father
        said that's
    the way of wasps or he thought it and I read it in the
        big white
    moonflower that hung above him, attached by a green
        umbilical
    cord. He'd walk to work every day, thin suit,
        boot-polish hair.

    Hope was a vinegar-colored halo that formed around
        our heads.
    It came and went, like fighting and fireflies. From the
        schoolyard
    I could see my mother holding a basket of wet laundry
    with clothespins in her mouth. It was strange to watch
        my own
    dresses and blouses swaying on the line. As if I'd been
        skinned alive.


    The potato sack filled with toys was beautiful

    though the toys were evil. A wooden, jointed snake.
    Not a cowboy gun but a black revolver. A jack-in-the-box
    that played a warped Chopin nocturne, and you don't

    want to know who leaped out of the box. There were
    features to be pressed into a potato to make a face
    but the essential ones were missing. What was left?

    A pipe. A monocle. A pair of juicy female lips. No
        wonder
    the old woman kept the sack in the attic where the
        flying
    squirrels hung from the rafters. But when I visited,

    which was often, she'd creep down the narrow
        stairway —
    all the woodwork in the house was a slick, lacquered
    walnut — and deliver the sack into my open arms.

    Out of those few objects I built my dubious lexicon.
    There was a hand mirror, and a naked baby doll.
    And a pink-nippled bottle for the child filled with
        what

    had long ago been a milky liquid but was now the
        color
    of absinthe, once known as "la fée verte," the Green
        Fairy.


    People, the ghosts down in North-of-the-South aren't see-through

    They don't wear nightgowns or whisper or sing
    or want hazy things from the ones of us who are
        living.
    They have skin, bones, people. They're short in stature
    and they don't walk through walls. They come in our
        houses

    by kicking down doors, wearing porkpie hats and
        smoking
    those My Father cigars. Yellow sweat stains
    on their sleeveless undershirts, my people. I'm sure
    there are other kinds of ghosts other places,

    sad angels wearing bloomers and fanning their wings,
    but here their faces are made of gristle and their eyes
    are red from too much Thunderbird. They want to
        steal
    our valuables, mess shit up, drop a match and burn

    down the house. I don't know any other way to say it,
    people. They walk right into our kitchens without
        being invited,
    tracking mud, lifting the fish by the tail out of the
        fryer
    and stuffing it in a cloth sack the color of a potato

    just pulled out of the ground, and if there was a potato
    pulled fresh out of the ground they'd take that too.
    Their pee sizzles when it hits the floor. They don't
        hear
    prayers or heed four-leaf clovers. We have to give

    our bodies to the task. I mean we push back, people.
    Harder than day labor. Harder than shoving a bull
    out of the cow paddock. Two bulls. We have to say
    leave my goddamned house. Go, motherfucker.

    My fucking house. Shouting while pushing, like breach
        birth,
    or twins. They slap on that corpse-smelling aftershave
    and come calling, holding a bouquet of weeds. They
        want
    our whiskey, our gravy, our honey, our combs, our
        bees.


    An occasion is a rare occasion

    Rare as a bloodbath in a barn. In our county,
    not one bloodbath in a barn, but a redbird
    in a birdbath is ho-hum. A field is ho-hum.
    A horizon is just a girl yawning at the edge

    of a field holding a long, curved stick.
    She remembers reading ho-hum in a book
    and it was odd to her though not odd
    enough to be an occasion. Rhubarb leaves

    curling up out of the dirt in the spring
    are not an occasion. Things that happen
    on their own without help are ho-hum
    like popping out a baby but a baby shower

    is an occasion, a small occasion but it counts.
    There are cupcakes to be frosted blue
    and balloons to blow up with the breath
    of our own bodies though now

    there are helium tanks. Have you sucked in
    enough? Did your voice sound high
    and strange? That is a miniature occasion,
    but then your voice goes back to its usual

    ragged self so in the end sucking helium
    is a temporary occasion. All occasions
    are temporary in our county. A silo in a field
    is ho-hum but if it burns it is a temporary

    occasion. So many things burn that fires
    are in danger of becoming ho-hum.
    Only the strange fires count.
    The supermarket fire with its exploding

    jars of pickles, the outdoor movie-screen fire.
    The firehouse fire. In our county
    clouds are bags heavy with empties
    gathered from parking lots of strip malls

    and shut-down pattern factories.
    Soon there will be enough to cash in.
    Soon the sky will rain quarters.
    Enough for bread and bologna

    and squares of American cheese
    and cereal shaped like stars. The milk
    in the bowl will go pink with the pinkness
    of the stars. That will be an occasion.


    Hub

    I. My first rainshade was sun-blasted,

    with room enough for boys. Then came one covered in
        umber-colored horses,
    which galloped, when I had the wherewithal to spin
        the crook handle, like figures

    in a zoetrope. The kids on 17th St. called themselves
        the Dismantlers, stripping
    away the canopy from the ribs and stretchers and
        hollowing out the wooden

    shafts, filling them with gumballs and wild onions. My
        father was cynical
    about the whole enterprise. He'd walk in the rain like
        his tumors were made

    of sugar. It's not like my mother donated her skirts
        and dresses after he died.
    They just disappeared, absorbed into the wall at the
        back of her closet.

    She rescinded anything shelter-shaped, including the
        parasol flowers. The wind
    was our theatre, dramatically turning all bells
        inside-out: school bell, church bell,

    dinner bell. We became known as the town whose
        clappers were stolen by a series
    of gusts from the west. The only thing that tolled was
        the toll road. When Wanda

    gave up taxidermy and became a Jehovah's Witness,
        some of us absconded with her
    impressive collection of stuffed predatory birds, wings
        extended in mid-flight.

    I impaled mine, a barn owl with blue glass eyes, on a
        long copper tube I found
    at the shut-down pattern factory. I brandished my owl
        like a papal umbraculum

    whose purpose had nothing to do with weather, not
        shade but shadow. A mayoral
    candidate ran on a platform of installing a velarium
        over the town, a sort of awning,

    the corners tied to city limit signs, like the retractable
        one at the Roman Coliseum.
    He was defeated in a landslide. The minister's final
        sermon had a catchy title:

    There Is No Protection. Not Really. Even my mother
        nodded at that one,
    the smoke from her Viceroy entangled in her
        unwrangled curls.

    II. Was there ever a time that I bothered to stay dry?

    In my previous incarnation
    I didn't mind the flagellum
    made of peacock feathers,
    held over my head during

    cavalcades. You see, I had
    yet to be humbled. In New
    York, buoyed by the blowsy
    vapors of young love,

    I carried a lacquered paper one
    on a balsa handle, spring
    green painted
    with white violets, but only

    to cut a romantic figure,
    a small-breasted lusted-after
    girl flouncing off
    to the secretarial pool.

    Wetness was a way of life,
    upping the saturation
    of my little white blouses
    and beading my eyelashes

    with prisms. Translucency
    served my purposes,
    which were transparent
    as glass shoes. "Who's

    the queen now?" He said it
    in a lilting manner, the man
    wearing bright yellow rain gear.
    I hate foreshadowing.

III. The umbrella was the hub,

and the hub of the umbrella was the pole around which the cleats and skeleton ribs spun. From the hub arose many begettings. The peony was begotten, the woody stem echoing the umbrella pole, topped by the beguiling trivialities of petals, and the peony begat the Heartland Peony Society, which begat culture. Culture begat the faux peony, the petals sometimes made of silk, the stem, a hub of cold wire wrapped in green tape, which begat capitalism, which in turn begat tilt-o-whirls, tennis skirts and fireworks, all things that spin and flare for no reason other than the fact that spinning and flaring greases the machine, which begat the idea for a solar system — bodies circling the hubs of other bodies — which begat weather, and Christmas, which begat shopping, and denial — thus, our decision to believe that the ants crawling over the unbloomed heads of peonies were somehow rehabilitative. The lie begat love begat sex begat rabbits that lurked beneath the protective leaves of wild mandrake during rainstorms which begat the maypole, a hub with ribbons, and girls. Ma and Pa called things by their real names. Peony, they said, the word that begat us. We begat the euphemism. God, we said, looking at the umbrella impaled dead center in the lamb barn.

    IV. What was intriguing was not what the man took with him;

    it was the stuff he left behind.
    He took the butterflies

    but left the moths. He took
    Krishna but left Shiva.

    He left the cumbersome
    fishing boat and sinkers

    and musky lures but took
    the poles and spinner reels.

    He left the kid but took the toys.
    The man rented a storage locker

    and filled it with everything
    he'd brought with him

    from the old life, but after two
    months he stopped remembering

    to pay the rental fee. Everything
    was confiscated and put up

    for auction, the bleach bottle
    filled with marbles, the Sorry

    game, the thousand-piece puzzle
    of the Parthenon, the big statue

    of the thundercloud-colored
    god of love. He left behind,

    in the corner of the house's
    entryway, a long black umbrella

    with a carved lion's head handle,
    but took with him the invaluable

    praxinoscope, its circle of mirrors
    and whirling cylinder

    of hand-painted pictures
    of a woman walking in the rain.


    Spirea's covered in those clotted blooms

    as a newborn's coated by vernix. Irises rise up on
        meaty stems,
    buds still wrapped in something like rolling papers,
    purple pressing through, the color of entrails.

    You see, I've noticed. See, I've seen. I have more eyes
        than a potato
    bug has legs. More fears than eyes, or tears.

    At night I walk beneath the apple tree, the plum, the
        weeping cherry.
    Their cloak of blossoms is a heavy load,
    as is a head of waist-length hair and the wedding
        dress of that princess,

    so slight in flesh but draped in velvet hyacinths, and
        pearls like sinkers,
    and rhinestones like salt tears frozen in the maiden's
        eyes

    in "The Wreck of the Hesperus." I loved that girl,
        lashed to the mast of her father's ship,
    her hair rising and falling like seaweed on the billows.
    I wanted beauty like that, beauty that turned my
        dying eyes to cold, heavy jewels,

    and love like that, so stupid and blind it would
        preserve me by killing me.
    But now. Here, mid-May, past prime,

    the tulips brown and splay like washed-up things,
    and the glory girls have stepped out of their gowns,
        set down their racks,
    unlatched their trains. Beauty was a burden after all,
        wasn't it?

    And love. I remember it like some wet, leggy foal
    I had to hold in my arms for nights on end to keep it
        warm.

    Love was an unmothered thing, for the mother of love
        was heartless.
    I held on, as branches hold shivering sparrows in their
        arms,
    and a hundred little hollow nests like crowns of
        thorns.


    Maybe the fishmonger, who hands over the dead

    so tenderly or maybe the one rolling sushi wearing
    a hairnet and a half-smile or maybe no one, for I have
        held

    hands with a stone, I have held hands with an
        orphaned
    poplar tree whose leaves chattered like the milk teeth
        of a kid

    left for dead in a woven basket. I have held the
        freckled,
    sun-burnished face of the lily and stroked her with my
        palm,

    my fingerprints overwhelmed by her rusty pollen.
        Maybe
    her, maybe the aproned fishmonger, who has held
        hands

    with a boning knife and brushed away crushed ice
    from the cloudy eye and rid the pinkish flesh of pin
        bones,

    or no one, for when I was a girl I held my father's cold
    hand and he wore something like an apron, a cotton
        gown

    fastened with bows at the back, a gown covered in
        blue
    stars, and his black eyelashes splayed out like the
        open arms

    of starfish, and oh he was sad, there was salt in his
        cloudy
    eye, and something swam up into my throat and
        spawned

    and flapped its great tail, so perhaps I'm adrift in a
        skiff
    spiraling the hub of that tender sea, or maybe

    the fishmonger, maybe the mute cashier, or no one,
    or never, or the ancient bagger tattooed with an
        anchor.


    White violet, not so much an image

        of tenderness as an image of a memory of tenderness.
          I am ashamed

    to look at it this closely but can't stop fingering

          its five sticky petals, nebulous as water on the brink

        of becoming steam. Thin as a soul lingering for three
          days

        threatening to reignite into flesh, or a ghost

    climbing the body's bone ladder in order to abdicate

        the body's terms.

        This flower might as well be a girl named Violet,
          with dew on her upper lip,

    who elopes through her bedroom window, leaving only

        her thin, yellow-white chemise behind. Its petals are that
          fragile.

    They lack commitment to the material world, their molecules
        ascending,

        any minute now, evaporative, like a pretty infant
          bound

          and determined to fly back into the hands of
          nothingness,

    or a shepherd dispassionate about the lambs, always
        looking off

        into the lavender beyond.

        The only way to know tenderness is to dismantle it.

    That's the essential problem, how we must get out the
        jeweler's loupe

        and start dissecting, prying open the mauve sac

    at the base of the flower

        like a fox in the henhouse, looking for green ovaries
          spilling over with eggs,

          or Hawthorne's Aylmer, prying away at
            Georgiana's birthmark.

    I bring the torn flower to my mouth to confirm

        the myth of its honey, only to find it tastes gamey,
          green, like a hand

    that's held too long to copper coins. This close, its scent is not
        sweet

        but sour — I crush it to awaken its perfumes —
          acidic, unripe,

    puerile, stinging, tined.

        I remember a poet reading translations of Paul
          Valéry when I was

    young. I wore a white, gauzy dress with laces at the bodice,

        and the poet stood in a pool of heroic white-gold
          light

    with his shirt half-unbuttoned, his silver hair curling over
        his ears.

        "Perfume is what the flowers throw away," he
          read, quoting Valéry.

    Later he tried to pry me open, but I ran home barefoot through
        the rain

        under a foggy membrane of moon — that ventricular
          patch

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Excerpted from Four-Legged Girl by Diane Seuss. Copyright © 2015 Diane Seuss. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
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