Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
TOURING THE DOLL HOSPITAL
FALSETTO
AN OFFER RECEIVED IN THIS MORNING’S MAIL: - (On misreading an ad for a set of ...
THE SLIGHTLY PERVERSE WORLD OF MUSIC
THE FETUS’ CURIOUS MONOLOGUE
FATE
THE FLOATING WOMAN
WITCH SONGS
SWISH
THE ORACLE AT DELPHI, REINCARNATED AS A CONTEMPORARY ADOLESCENT GIRL
THE PASTRY CHEF’S DAUGHTER
FUCK YOU POEM #45
LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN
BUDDHA SONNET 1
BUDDHA SONNET 2
BUDDHA SONNET 3
THE NEW DOG
THE DAYS OF THE WEEK
POEM FOR BERNARD
WATCH
ON WANTING TO SEE GHOSTS - Ghosts only come to those who look for them.—Holeti
CIRCUS POSTER
PASTORAL OPERA SYNOPSIS
WHITE BLINDFOLD
THE OGRE’S TURBULENT ADOLESCENCE
DOMESTIC
SWANS
DENIAL
WHAT THE BODY WANTS
BAR AUBADE
ODE TO TOAST - “When you were alive ’Twas your favorite food. . . .”
ODE TO SEMEN
(POEM THAT SPILLS OFF THE PAGE) - A List of Answers to the Question: “And what, ...
A BLESSING AND A CURSE
A WIDOW
MIRIAM - “And his sister stood afar off, to wit what would be done to ...
HYMN TO THE NECK
IN THE ASPIRIN ORCHARD
Notes on the Poems
About the Author
PENGUIN POETS
Also by Amy Gerstler
The True Bride
Primitive Man
Past Lives (with Alexis Smith)
Bitter Angel
Nerve Storm
Crown of Weeds
Medicine
PENGUIN BOOKS
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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
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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 artist’s catalog for Darren Waterston published by St. Anne’s Press. The poems “Swish” and “Witch Songs” were texts written for a collaboration with artist Alexis Smith entitled “The Sorcerer’s 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.
TOURING THE DOLL HOSPITAL
Why so many senseless injuries? This one’s 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.
It’s 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.
Let’s sit by the legless Queen doll’s tiny wheelchair
and read to her awhile if she wishes it. In a faint
voice she requests a thimbleful of strong dark tea.
FALSETTO
A guy with a heavenly singing voice like Al Green’s
can make you believe he’s being melted alive, liquified
by pure yearning. The result is a kind of bee-less sung
honey. The singer I’m listening to this hot summer noon—
Dean, or is it Gene—sounds like he’s auditioning to be
female. No, it’s 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 whale’s belly pleaded sweetly with god,
warbled a high-pitched SOS. Falsetto elected a nest
of tiny silver cobras who twist themselves into tr
eble 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.
AN OFFER RECEIVED IN THIS MORNING’S MAIL:
(On misreading an ad for a set of CDs entitled Beethoven’s Complete Symphonies.)
The Musical Heritage Society
invites you to accept
Beethoven’s 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. (He’d 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,
with our miseries, or belching complaints
into grimy skies, further besmirching
the firmament. But just how relevant
is Beethoven these days, you may ask.
Wouldn’t 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 Beethoven’s 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. That’s 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 you’re having such a rough time.
Prone to illness, self-criticism
and squandered affections—
Ludwig (he’d like you to call him that,
if you’d do him the honor),
son of a drunk and a depressive,
was beaten, cheated, and eventually
went stone deaf. He too had to content
himself with clutching his beloved’s
toothmarked yellow pencils
(as the tortured scrawls in his notebooks
show) to sketch out symphonies, concerti,
chamber music, etcetera—works
that still brim, as does your disconsolate
soul, with unquenched fire and brilliance.
Give Beethoven a chance to show
how much he cares. Easy financing
available. And remember:
a century in heaven has not calmed
the maestro’s celebrated temper, so act now.
For god’s sake don’t make him wait.
THE SLIGHTLY PERVERSE WORLD OF MUSIC
Someone wakes you
by blowing gently on your eyes,
or tickling your chin with a handful of flowering grasses.
Remember the glassed-in greenhouse, the old fire station,
herds of black faced sheep?
Even strayed cows or a lone goat
may wander along a swath of fallow, unfenced mind
in search of tastier grazing from time to time.
Tonight, the reigning notes are sad and forlorn,
long lost octaves hung out to dry,
flashes of forgotten nights,
besotted, bawdy, sleepless,
and all too brief.
THE FETUS’ CURIOUS MONOLOGUE
My tail was longer than my hindlegs
not so long ago. I remember the Flood
several Ice Ages being covered with fur
chalk beds trilobites giant ferns
a scaley monstrosity crawling out of the sea
croaking a great surprise awaits you
Will I too grow fins? feelers? an elephant’s trunk?
Cheerful to this hour, afloat in my private ocean,
I plan to make a grand entrance,
howling in molten dialect, Even the sea’s spooky depths
shall not alarm me for I am already sunk!
The life of darting shadows, the deceptive surface
of the world—I shall see right through
to the seaweedy bottom. I will not be fooled!
The body’s hinges itch.
Gill slits ventilated my neck
until yesterday.
A newfangled monster,
Now what will I breathe?
green lipped mussels
horseshoe crabs
coral and snails
waterworms
all sing of unalloyed joy and reciprocrated lust—
proof of progress, proof that evolution
is not just erosion, proof chiseled from limestone quarries
of womanly virtue (ageless patience, the warp and woof
of heredity’s tireless loom),
proof we do not really die
when our brief terms expire
swim bladders of fish.
A solitary wasp of consciousness
buzzes in my head while below,
the usual two room shack,
a bi-chambered heart is being constructed.
Someday I will have a scarlet hat and a ring,
perfect pitch,
a longing to be admonished.
Torn from the shores of immortality
I’m due to wash into the world soon,
wearing the face of a retired opera singer
mid-aria, famished and squalling.
I’m a festival of cells.
My blood’s as rich as Christmas
punch. Was I a horse thief in another life?
A blasphemous priest? What were my crimes?
What have I done to deserve to be bottled up thus?
FATE
Reports of strange gatherings at the church in the pines
have been filtering in. It’s said photogenic intellectuals
appear from time to time as mist in the kitchen. One groans,
“Yes, I built the doomed ship and was promised I’ll suffer for it.
In lives to come I will know titanic miseries. This I have been:
a hindrance and a snitch and a babysitter and a ranch hand.
And a fry cook and a civilising influence and a whimperer.
Catching wind of the near-death experiences of the little blind
waif traveling to Africa made a believer of me. She cured
my not-so-subliminal jitters. ‘Picture me naked, if it helps
quiet your mind,’ she suggested, fingering pins jabbed
into the small black cloth voodoo doll in her pocket.
Now she belongs to the soil and the sky, proof of our puniness.
When I lie my cleanest, most blameless self down in a bare,
airless room, a warning voice, hers of course, jabbers
gruff barracks talk. She says, ‘You’re all washed up, buddy,’
‘At last, my love, I’m here,’ and ‘Get dressed quick, for you
too have been summoned.’ So when I wake up smack dab
in the middle of the night shouting the names of my fellow
passengers, prisoners really, urging them to jump
into the heaving sea, now you’ll know why.”
THE FLOATING WOMAN
Know, my dears, that gravity
is conditional. Its grip is no stranglehold.
Had my mother lived I could
have taught her this. I was nine
when she died clipping coupons
at the kitchen table on a sweltering day.
She wore only her slip, inside out, so you
could see the seams and mended hem.
A baseball game flickered on TV
with the sound off. I could hear small thuds
as figs from the tree in our yard fell and hit
the tin roof. I caught pneumonia
that summer and for months outslept
everyone, even the cat. Then Dad
crashed his beloved car (an ancient
pale green Mercedes with fins
and a mermaid hood ornament
he’d sawed off an old swim trophy
of mother’s one inebriated evening).
When I got well I began to lie
in a big pile of eucalyptus leaves behind
the house and practice rising. With my
talents I could have toured the world
but I do not profit by travel.
I let a local magician think
it is all his doing, but in truth I float
under my own power. Sacrifice lightens,
voluntary or not. Loss rids us of ballast.
Then come the ascensions . . .
WITCH SONGS
Women really are diabolical.
Ask one, she’ll admit it.
They’re all witches under the skin.
Plotting, scheming, their recipes
need ingredients like graveyard
dust and possum teeth.
Those they have molested fear them.
They persist in begging
and become unpopular in their villages.
Witches are said to kiss beasts.