*
Halfway through the poem another poem took over.
The two poems fought. It was
a bloody battle that lasted seven hundred years.
Big choices were made
and gods among men died.
While stained sheets were wrung out in the wind,
cannons roared.
After seven hundred years the two poems were mangled.
They couldn’t tell the difference anymore between themselves.
And they became, then, masochistic:
self-inflicting
on the battlefield their rage.
On a glorious morning, high up on a hill,
in hussar boots and mauve silk vest, the poem raged on—
infantry in massed columns—
the trillium of chivalry
ridden to its final thing.
It wore itself
into a bonfire, dying down. You have
to stand very close to it
with your hands or ass
even closer.
In the dark it’s like porn,
beet red
and bright orange, flecks of engorged blue veins,
humping in the ash
for eternity.
The Fall
If it happened at all
it was the apes who won,
shimmering stark-naked
and sitting a little apart from Adam,
who was deep into his clothing
the cuff links and soft leather,
pulling the zipper up Eve’s back
and she, clasping the bra shut like a jewelry box—
What to do with this mind?
Throw everything
into the fire and scream
into the internet
that there’s nothing to do
but stand in the dark recesses
throwing a bright red dodge ball
against the bone facade
and fall in and out of love
with suffering?
The Woman Downstairs
In the night I realize we’re living in the same apartment building.
All this time! She lives downstairs, in a room filled with cats.
I rush to her—my grandmother, in a total chaos of furniture,
lying on a mattress on the floor.
“No one comes by anymore,” she says. “I’m so bored.”
In her face I can see the unfathomable loneliness
of the dead, like its own failed revolution.
Her body spilling out of a flannel button-down shirt.
Her wrinkled skin pooled
beneath her half-naked body.
The smell of urine is overwhelming.
Different parts of the vacuum cleaner are scattered around
like sniper rifle fittings, fancy small attachments
piled up around the mattress: Sub 20 Universal Brush,
Mini Turbo, the Extra Wide Upholstery sucker—
which I begin to gather and click together—what good is any of it?
“Oh, don’t clean,” she begs from the floor.
The Walking Dead
She doesn’t know she’s dead, so you don’t bring it up.
In the woods you carry her around with your bow and arrow.
She’s so thin, her skin is like a bolt of peach-flecked silk
sagging off the arm. Her hair is unnatural, fiery red.
A bird is trapped in the living room—“Darn thing came down from the chimney, covered in soot,” you say.
It gets bigger and bigger until it’s a massive red-black blur
flapping in your face.
The Lit Club Slaughter
in my sister’s dress, feeling the pockets
of famous writers, living and dead—their brittle balls
of used Kleenex, their grocery lists
and fragrant marijuana in tins, their loose change
and half-done cough drops, cracked cellphones
and hair brushes, their Mactaggart jewelry—holy
amethyst and gold Egyptian talisman,
their nips of Old Crow, letters of intent,
trust documents and set lists—I’m too drunk
to bargain. Instead, I’m hounding Patti Smith about her life.
That punk-poet genius—I’m telling her about you.
I’m making things up. It was
a beautiful, caramel-colored evening, until I was
slashing my wrists in the bathroom
with a pair of scissors after I’d been led by Rosanne
into the street and put into a cab.
And I reached your voice
across the veil. It said: quit smoking.
You’re getting fat.
Be nice to your mother.
In general, I am the life
of the party. And it’s always the eve of battle.
In general, I am hard and quiet. Like a floorboard
from a tree long gone. Like a floorboard
sanded down, shellacked, hammered in a house
no one lives in anymore.
In the Champagne Room with Grandma
Where are the high rollers in the MSCOG?
Tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single visit,
the hardest part of loving her.
The water is deep. Too deep to touch
the bottom; I have to swim around the rim of the glass
holding on. Mourning doves in the chandeliers,
with delicate clucks, gold lamé and plush control room,
old lady without her pants on,
incontinent beauty queen,
peering out of a beaded curtain
or lying back, reading Wodehouse on a black pleather couch
chuckling in the yellow lightbulb spray—
we have your best interests at heart.
We take you into the Champagne Room, blushing,
looking lost and easy at the entrance to the peep show.
Are you paying attention?
We’re way down on the food chain with the krill.
And we’re the only species left alone to die in bed.
The shadow grows long in the club.
Swim into her, who hangs in your family tree,
the plum tree that won’t bear fruit.
Drag the lake. Keep it coming.
There are no limits.
Premium content: Sappho, the essential Philip K. Dick,
dead leaves around a daffodil
too early to pick;
coffee before dawn, rye bread with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!
everything tastes so real—
maple leaves made of silver;
we turn to swans,
we wear black mourning brassieres—
Here, in the MSCOG, we love you just as you are.
We pay your tuition.
We overdraft for you.
We write you check after check—for food,
or a cord of wood, new paintbrushes—
we’ll pay for it, while we say, “I’m BROKE. I haven’t GOT it!”
But we got it. We always got it.
Elegy with Clothes
All of your giant beige bras
floated up into the atmosphere.
Blue eggs fell down the chimney;
the porch,
losing its screened-in mind,
caved in.
I mistake one living cell for another.
of my life—
you come
detonating midair
with your own grief—
it’s not even mine.
I watch mice eat through everything,
their droppings
like beads of hashish.
The world begins as
a wolf tied to a flower.
Can you see how it happens
like that?
Something
too violent
is attached to something
too living?
I’ll Be Happy
once I am able to plunge, pig head on the platter that I am,
into the next jazz era of my sense. When the moon floats into me,
and the teetotaler mountain range—when the moon,
with its neon disk mouth, liquors up, gets wasted, wide open
on the human-achievement anecdotes, when the corn
gets more terrifying than me, in my maternity nightgowns,
and the rain leaves everything in the RV husked with dew
and the night sends out its bizarre night-bird sounds—
once I am freed from my education, held aloft by my ignorance
and the auspices of my wasted afternoons—
well then—what then? Then I will make a new list
and long for happiness again.
Historic Flaws
I am going back to the mountains
where the alternating universe of autumn
descends over you in an erotic squat. Out of that blank
and meaningless Play-Doh of my psychic flesh
I am moving on. I am a pupil of fading antiquity.
Sprawled across the table, in a lament about health care
and the ineptitude of the System.
Nothing burns quite like the System. It comes at you
when you ask for help, displaying its super-talons
around a clutch of arrows, saying No.
“What deeds could man ever have done
if he had not been enveloped in the dust-cloud
of the unhistorical?” Nietzsche asks this morning
from a small pamphlet on my lap, issued in 1949
in New York City, which I am leaving now,
like a wife from her distant husband
who will not stop to ask her why she is weeping
while on the floor of the closet she slices apart his silk ties.
The Dark Ages, Revisited
Up early again reading Geneviève Fraisse’s Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy—
in which I read the line
“A man satisfied with prejudices is not concerned
by the disorder of his arguments.”
Which illuminates Donald Trump, who oils his way across the tangible world.
But what about the Möbius Strip Club of Grief?
I find there’s no solace in it for me today.
I feel the phantom limbs of my predecessors
waving in the air. I feel
a public vs. private activity of self-mutilation: the human race
voting for the wrong thing.
And to exercise our rights, to fulfill our duties—our education seems, today,
to have not been enough.
And, well, women have long differed from men, in their (let’s call it) social destinies
but not in their capabilities.
It has come again, the Dark Ages,
arguing for factory jobs and the security of middle management.
The hallucination far from actual benevolence of the universe.
The life lived for someone else, for a few free months of leisure before
expensive death.
My second thesis might involve Love, and/or the “Fine Mind.”
Because the woman’s mind is different. Invoked differently, even as her body is—
I’m not sure of my argument yet.
(It was always my weakest skillin school, knowing my argument.)
But, as a whole, reader, it is faulty
to speak of “sex and sexuality when it is the mind at issue.”
So why am I writing this psychosexual opus to the mind of my women?
And Hillary Clinton, what are you doing right now?
(The club is closed for the week, ran out of solace.
The smell
of bleach in the air.
I keep replaying it in my head—)
On some level, weakness and strength
have nothing to do with the physical form. But this relationship
between the physical and the intellectual forms—
what of that? Leaving behind the imposed moral activities
of the human mind—we must invent, while living a life:
nothing irrelevant here, nothing stopping you—invent!
invent!
invent!
stretch out
a social destiny!
(—I keep saying this to my mother, to my
sister, to the old impression of Grandma
brushing her hair upside down
and reading the encyclopedia in a flowerbed—)
Invent with your hands! or forever hold your peace!
But it is pointless to tell you how I
feel. Often we don’t feel like doing anything.
Each shred of dignity is shredded again. And it looks just like it is:
like high school football all over again, framed in my window, running hard
to get one more yard line ahead, on only a few feet of rubber grass.
The dream of multiple selves that keeps not coming true
is made true with a few feelings, set aside.
The apartment we’re in is strange and small.
My things don’t fit. I destroy my things.
I sneak them to the trashcan. I feel
awful. I’d meant
to do something.
But what good is any of it?
I let it go
sometimes—this grief.
Goodbye, I say. Thank you for your service, I say.
Old heliumed balloon wheezing out,
hovering five feet in the air
just like the ghost that can neither ascend nor
fall. Stuck in the ether. Sweeping. Wiping everything down. Locking
the front door. Turning off lights. Sitting, finally,
sighing, saying to the dark
bittersweet self: Thank you. Oh, Thank you.
Thank you.
And Goodnight.
Bibliography:
Mason, Ameria Ruth Gere. The Women of the French Salons. New York: The Century Company, 1891.
Stone, Ruth. “The Möbius Strip of Grief,” What Love Comes To. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2008.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. “At the Sea-Side,” The Golden Book of Poetry. Ed. Jane Werner Watson; Gertrude E Espenscheid. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947.
Fraisse, Geneviève. Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
(here, the poem ends with the famous ending line from the poem Le Mérite des Femmes as was referenced in Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy.)
Dick, Philip K. VALIS. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.
Mann, Bonnie. Women’s Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Magazines in which these poems have previously appeared:
“[Odin plucked out his eye in exchange for a drink],” and “How Not,” in Stedt; “Lap Dance,” in The Georgia Review; “Letter to a Letter to the Editors,” “Math,” and “Emily Dickinson,” in The Brooklyn Rail; “Apes,” “Introduction,” “Hunter,” and “Interior Design,” in Tin House; “The Ones Who Got Away With It,” in Pinwheel; “Historic Flaws,” and “Making Applesauce with My Dead Grandmother,” at poets.org; “Migration,” Visionary Binary; “Self-Destruction Sequence,” and “The Fates,” in jubilat; “Elegy with a Swear Word,” and “Elegy With Clothes,” in The Bakery.
PHOTO © HILLERY STONE
BIANCA STONE is a writer and visual artist. She was born and raised in Vermont and moved to New York City in 2007 where she received her MFA from NYU. She collaborated with Anne Carson on Antigonick, a book pairing Carson’s translation of Antigone with Stone’s illustration and comics (New Directions, 2012). Stone is the auth
or of the poetry collection Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, (Tin House Books and Octopus Books, 2014) and Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours (Pleiades Press, 2016). Her poems, poetry comics, and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines including Poetry, jubilat, and Tin House. She has returned to Vermont with her husband and collaborator, the poet Ben Pease, and their daughter Odette, where they run the Ruth Stone Foundation and letterpress studio.
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Copyright © 2018 Bianca Stone
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