Hahn - The Artists Daughter

Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. W ith appreciation to the editors of the following publications in which earlier versions of these poems first appeared: Global City Review, Hanging Loose, Hayden Ferry Review, Kenyon Review, Long Shot, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry from Chicago's Guild, U.S. Latino Review. With gratitude to the Lila WallaceReaders Digest Fund for a generous award that provided time to write and rewrite this collection. With special thanks to Tony Hoagland and Andrew Gebhardt for their insights. With continuing thanks to Jill Bialosky.

With the deepest love always to my own artists daughters, Miyako and Reiko. Mosquito & Ant Volatile The Unbearable Heart Earshot Air Pocket We Stand Our Ground (coauthored with Gale Jackson and Susan Sherman) In her lovers studio, the walls, smeared and splattered in half a dozen versions of black, his brushes in discarded tomato cans here, her body is light as if shafts of light cut limbs off her torso, as if the air pricked the recollection: gripping his finger when she crossed the street to his first and last gallery shownot the lover but the father. Light, her gut light not from the stunning sun but from the redolence of turpentine which is all she needs to fall in love. He, the lover, knows this and although is not figurative, pulls her skirt up, tears her stockings off and licks her sex, his tongue soft as a brush. The lover knows the truth about this light and its attachment to tissue. She knows the truth about history is not some fact but an image teased from nerve endings.

Hers, she surmises, no different from his watching his sister in their parents bathroom disrobe so gingerly he was sure each gesture was performed for a god. Did that sister notice him in the misted mirror and pretend she did not so he could, decades later, never paint the body as a body and always love oils thickly applied to canvas the size of a door? Did she? And does the artists daughter finally cast off what she herself cant form into a subject to be seized by this particular fragrance on the floor half-covered in tarp? In the first cage she wants the man to enter on his hands and knees. She will strap his ankles to the chair legs; bind his wrists together behind his back. This is the arrangement. But if he says the name of his sister or neighbor or former spouse, if he misses his extra-firm pillowthe one familiar to some old girlfriendif he thinks of a subway stop where he watched a blonde stranger apply lipstick, if he turns his gaze, she will beat him bloody until there is nothing left but a pile of teeth. She will hold a mirror in front of herself so all he can see are her fingertips and crown.

All he can hear is a murmur. She is wearing a dress the shade of moonlight pink. Deep breath. Pour a glass of water. In the second cage she, middle-aged and cut, wants to make love to a man. She unwraps three mirrors and props them near her mattress.

She sees herself as she slips on fishnet stockings, a black bra, a silk skirt; as she lifts the hem and fingers her clit through the net, she likes that her body is fleshy. When the man appears at the door he invites her outside but she wants him to join her in this play. He smiles. Watch, she says nodding to the mirror and pulling out his cock, watch while I go down on you. Then Ill watch while you go down on me. She nods. She nods.

And he starts with her left breast so he can hear her heart. What is missing? A map? A blood-stained key? A hand to take you there? A new dress fashioned of scarves, antique and moth-eaten? A boom box? A girlfriend who will hold you outside these barswhere you feel queasy-homesick in your own gut; who will know where the woman and the girl belong? Herethe girlfriend says, say the word belong. Be long. Be. Longing. Belongings.

Say all the possibilities. Deliberately. Pace. Eat. Excite. Exit. A feather. A blanket. A blanket.

A coffee cup with silly advertising. String tied for cats cradle. A hammer or scythe. When the woman stands at the door she puts on Motown to get the blood boiling. She said. i.

As she twirls around her skirt swirls up. Shes lifting her pink flannel skirt. The black river snakes through the blue forest. He drops the orange stones on the gray path. Thank you, moon! Although every story is about severing cords. The bread.

The furnace. We walk home with pockets full of frightful gold. ii. The house overlooks a bitter garden. So dark green it is black. A mother spills milk on the blue tile.

The white rivulet streams out the kitchen door over everything but the neighbors alive greens. Elbows confess to splinters from the windowsill. The daughters yellow hair will become a golden ladder. As she twirls around her skirt swirls up. iii. The girl adores her pink dog.

Her mother adores her and her own mother. As she twirls around her skirt swirls up. She may not bring her dog to her grandmother whose fever is in a rush. The long pink path collapses. The red cloak. The basket.

The jagged teeth. The hot smell as if grandmother left the iron on. iv. Her nails are white and pink. A sunrise is white and pink. The tree behind the mill bears cherries.

Sometimes the fruit is so familiar even the jays do not pluck any. Ah, little girl! Oh, little daughter! As she twirls around her skirt swirls up. The crows know about raw stumps. v. She ran holding the jar and fell, cutting open her chest. The scar does not mar her beauty.

As she twirls around her skirt swirls up. The bite of apple does not corrupt not the crust of sleep in her eyes. Seven pairs of fingers smudge the glass. She can think in her dream state that she dreams. vi. The caterpillar droppings sound like rain outside her room behind the kitchen where the ashes are gray and gentle.

The mice are rats. The mother is dead. The real mother is always dead. As she twirls around her skirt swirls up. Those rags that smell like foresight. vii.

The mother sews doll dresses from scraps of her own silk and chiffon hems. Even the oldest girl adores dolls. As she twirls around her gown swirls up. The twelve sisters lift their skirts. The father betrays by being father; the child, the child. So their dancing slippers wear thin each night.

In bed their ecstatic feet pulse with blisters. things dont die or remain damaged but return: stumps grow back hands, a head reconnects to a neck, a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic. Later this vision is not True: the grandmother remains dead not hibernating in a wolfs belly. Or the blue parakeet does not return from the little grave in the fern garden though one may wake in the morning thinking mothers call is the bird. Or maybe the bird is with grandmother inside light. Or grandmother was the bird and is now the dog gnawing on the chair leg.

Where do the gone things go when the child is old enough to walk herself to school, her playmates already pumping so high the swing hiccups? Whether in chrome surgery or gymnasium toilet everyone is expelled bloody and bleating, tube attached from mass to mass, the slick itself turning vivid. Whether there or in this floor-through, Mother, I have missed you terribly miss you, though I know about mothering myself. This afternoon Madeline Carmichael, 61, was convicted of fatally beating two-year-old Latanisha then embalming her body in newsprint, plastic, and mothballs in a trunk in a closet to keep her closest. The stench rose from that secret threshold, made her presence alive for two decades until Andres, ready to search for his twin, asked his older sister Sabrina what became of Latanisha and the secret became memory for the adult children. Until the cold case squad attended to the painted-over closet, though the mother told the super to evict the ghost weeping in the vestibule, the remains had remained just that. In the end that missing daughter had come of age, moved out, was on her own in the mothers infested imagination.