Gerstler - Ghost Girl

Table of Contents

Also by Amy Gerstler

The True Bride
Primitive Man
Past Lives (with Alexis Smith)
Bitter Angel
Nerve Storm
Crown of Weeds
Medicine

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First published in Penguin Books 2004

Copyright Amy Gerstler, 2004

All rights reserved
Page vii constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Gerstler, Amy.
Ghost girl / Amy Gerstler.
p. cm.(Penguin poets.)

eISBN : 978-1-440-68413-5

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

for Sidney and Miriam Gerstler

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the following people for their kind assistance:

Bernard Cooper, Dennis Cooper, Liam Rector, Judith Moore, David Lehman, Megan Williams, Paul Slovak, David Trinidad, Tony Cohan, Alexis Smith, Tom Knechtel, Brian Tucker, Jane Weinstock, Sue Greenberg, Dinah Mills. And most especially, Benjamin Weissman.

Many thanks to the Durfee Foundation whose Artists Award helped make it possible for the author to complete this book.

Poems in this manuscript were previous published in the following magazines, sometimes in slightly altered form:

Epoch, Fence, Tight, Slope, Luna, Lungful, Faultline, Bedwetter, Sycamore Review, American Poetry Review, Mall Punk, 5 AM, The New Yorker, Pool, The Cafe Review, Columbia Poetry Review, The Literary Review, Crowd, Green Mountain Review, Indiana Review, Washington Square, Mississippi Review, Poetry/Memoir/Story, and Margie.

The three poems Buddha Sonnet 1-3 originally appeared in an artists catalog for Darren Waterston published by St. Annes Press. The poems Swish and Witch Songs were texts written for a collaboration with artist Alexis Smith entitled The Sorcerers Apprentice. Portions of those texts originally appeared as part of that installation, which began at the Miami Art Museum and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Why so many senseless injuries? This ones glass teeth
knocked out. Eyes missing, or stuck open or closed.
Limbs torn away. Sawdust dribbles onto the floor
like an hourglass running out. Fingerless hands, noses
chipped or bitten off. Many are bald or burnt. Some,
we learn, are victims of torture or amateur surgery.
Do dolls invite abuse, with their dent-able heads,
those tight little painted-on or stitched-in grins?
Hurt me, big botched being, they whine in a dialect
only puritans and the frequently punished can hear.
Its what I was born for. I know my tiny white pantaloons
and sheer underskirts incite violation. Criers and cribwetters
pursue us in dreams, till we wake sweatdrenched
but unrepentant, glad to have the order
by which we lord over them restored. Small soldiers
with no Geneva Conventions to protect them,
they endure gnawing, being drooled on, banishment
to attics. Stained by cough syrup, hot cocoa, and pee,
these clean gallant souls wear their wounds as martyrs
garments. We owe them everything. How they suffer
for our sins, splintered, bursted, crumbled... Every
bed in the head replacement ward is occupied tonight.
Lets sit by the legless Queen dolls tiny wheelchair
and read to her awhile if she wishes it. In a faint
voice she requests a thimbleful of strong dark tea.

A guy with a heavenly singing voice like Al Greens
can make you believe hes being melted alive, liquified
by pure yearning. The result is a kind of bee-less sung
honey. The singer Im listening to this hot summer noon
Dean, or is it Genesounds like hes auditioning to be
female. No, its more like he swallowed a woman whole,
without even mussing her lovely hair. Now their duets,
entwined laments, spill from his lips, reveries of what
each has embraced, squandered, fucked, drunk up.
His singing gives off a whiff of what we once called sin.
Then she slipped off her girdle, and we recognized
her as blessing, or maybe her kid sister, bliss. Jonah
in the whales belly pleaded sweetly with god,
warbled a high-pitched SOS. Falsetto elected a nest
of tiny silver cobras who twist themselves into treble clefs
to represent it on paper. Those within earshot close
their eyes as the cries of bog men and ice maidens mating
rise from an abandoned amber mine. He who sings perfect
soprano like this, he who wields the orchid sword
cannot be resisted, at least until this record ends.

(On misreading an ad for a set of CDs entitled Beethovens Complete Symphonies.)

The Musical Heritage Society
invites you to accept
Beethovens Complete Sympathies.
A full $80.00 value, yours for $49.95.
The brooding composer
of Ode to Joy now delighting
audiences in paradise nightly
knows your sorrows. Just look
at his furrowed brow, his thin
lipped grimace. Your sweaty
2 am writhings have touched
his great teutonic heart. Peering
invisibly over your shoulder
he reads those poems you scribble
on memo pads at the office,
containing lines like o lethal blossom,
I am your marionette forever,
and a compassionate smile trembles
at the corners of his formerly stern
mouth. (Hed be thrilled to set
your poems to music.) This immortal
master, gathered to the bosom
of his ancestors over a century ago,
has not forgotten those left behind
to endure gridlock and mind-ache,
wearily crosshatching the earths surface
with our miseries, or belching complaints
into grimy skies, further besmirching
the firmament. But just how relevant
is Beethoven these days, you may ask.
Wouldnt the sympathies of a modern
composer provide a more up-to-date
form of solace? Well, process this info-byte,
21st century skeptic. A single lock
of Beethovens hair fetched over $7,000
last week at auction. The hairs were then
divided into lots of two or three and resold
at astronomical prices. Thats how significant
he remains today. Beethoven the great-hearted,
who used to sign letters ever thine,
the unhappiest of men , wants you
to know how deeply sorry he is
that youre having such a rough time.
Prone to illness, self-criticism
and squandered affections
Ludwig (hed like you to call him that,
if youd do him the honor),
son of a drunk and a depressive,
was beaten, cheated, and eventually